[TYPO3-core] RFC: #11843 Add a reports module

[Ingo Renner]

Hi all,

This is an SVN patch request.

Type: New feature (yes!)


Bugtracker references:
http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=11843


Branches:
Trunk


Problem:

Currently there's no quick and easy way to get an reports concerning the 
systems's health or several modules doing that are spread through the BE.


Solution:

Add an extensible module to show different kinds of reports. As a first 
report add a system status report giving an overview of the system's 
"health".

The extension provided in the patch basically only acts as a container 
for many more reports to come, consolidating them in a single, central 
place.
The system status report is only the first report that plugs into the 
reports module. The status report itself is also extensible so that 
other extensions can show statuses there. The scheduler could show 
whether it's been set up properly when it ran last f.e. Or the recently 
release EXT:solr (shameless plug! ;) ) will provide a status reporting 
whether it can connect to the Solr search server, whether its index is 
optimized, how many documents are pending to be indexed and so on.

Also the system status is not complete yet in the sense that there can 
be checks against a required minimum MySQL version, gd version and so on 
for example. These can be provided even after beta1 I guess.

Concerning the current structure of the checks in status report: Checks 
concerning the install tool are located in the reports extension as it 
would feel strange if the install tool would check its own status 
itself. General checks concerning the overall system health are located 
in the install tool though for reasons of reusability (see below).


Notes:

This feature has also been inspired by Drupal.

The table of the status report is using the styles of the flash 
messages, so this is a convergence of features.

Further possible reports:

* move the BE Log to the reports module (done already, separate RFC 
after the base EXT is in)
* update report showing available updates for the core and extensions. 
Highlighting critical and security relevant updates.
* security report checking all kinds of security related things
* statistics
* indexed search index overview
* ... (feel free to post more ideas at the bugtracker entry)

Due to the extensibility of the reports module some of these can be 
provided even between 4.3 and 4.4. Candidates for that would be the 
security and update reports, both will probably require changes on 
typo3.org's infrastructure and will thus not make it into 4.3.

Documentation on how to extend the mmodule and the status report is 
going to follow, this RFC is just meant to meat the feature freeze 
deadline. This has been agreed on with Olly already.

Further ideas:
  * A scheduler task could be set up to regularly run the status checks 
and whenever something turns "red" will send a notification email.
  * The status class and the existing checks are already implemented in 
a way so that they can (and should) be reused by a new installer.



All the best
Ingo

-- 
Ingo Renner
TYPO3 Core Developer, Release Manager TYPO3 4.2