[TYPO3-core] (New) TYPO3 CMS Vision

[Michael Stucki]

Hi Thomas,

you asked me on Twitter to reply to your mail. Here are my thoughts:

> CMS is to me currently an „over-feature-complete“ that struggles to move
> forward due to it’s legacy. Many concepts there aren’t used widely
> anymore and still have to be maintained for this one single customer
> somewhere. The ACs fear removing features because it could also mean a
> loss of customers. Personally I don’t fear that because new features
> will evolve faster out of a lean code base and this could attract either
> some new or existing customers again.

In most of the cases, such features don't hurt if we keep them. That's
legacy. Very often there is no gain by removing some feature. Instead we
will disappoint users again.

Removing any feature will also mean that every project needs work to get
the replacement adapted. I would rather like to see someone provide a
good replacement, and when >80% use it, we remove the old feature.

It is difficult to argue about such numbers for features which are
rarely used since the beginning. You might think that nobody uses it,
but someone else depends on it in every project. I think we better focus
on new features rather than cleaning up too much...

> So after spending the last two years with thinking about our ecosystem
> and talking to all product teams and users I personally see complexity
> as our biggest issue in our ecosystem.

Yes and no. I agree that TYPO3 is complex, some parts should be
simplified, we could start with the communication part (since you
mentioned it).

But don't forget that TYPO3 was complex since the beginning. It was a
"big ball of mud" (you could have put that in nicer words ;-)) since then.

That's why I say we should focus on our existing users first. They have
learned to cope with the complexity of the TYPO3 ecosystem, it seems to
be ok for them.

> This is why I’m currently rather working on integrating composer
> strongly in Flow and CMS. We had a meeting on the DDs where some people
> from the CMS and Flow team have been asked by me if we want to commit
> fully to a composer based ecosystem.

How? By dropping TER? Seriously?

> You can compare that to a
> conference in 1866 in Bern where Germany, France, Switzerland and other
> European countries tried to align upon a common rail standard. The
> standard here is already adopted by large parts of the PHP ecosystem and
> if we commit we could integrate more and more components from this
> ecosystem as maybe in the mid future vice versa.

The example is wrong. When this conference was held there were no rails
yet. That's a huge difference to TYPO3.

Imagine that the countries would meet again in 2014 to agree on smaller
rails. The costs would explode for a relatively small gain. I think it's
pretty much the same here...

I don't say that composer integration should be stopped. If you find a
way to let it coexist with TER then fine. But don't forget that everyone
who uses TYPO3 today is ok with using TER.
One day we might be at the point where >80% use composer, then we can
come back to this point. I only think that it won't happen...

Greetings, Michael