[TYPO3-ect] tx_party - Extension

[Jeff Segars]

Hey Niels,
I'll jump in on Christoph's behalf since he's in class for a while.

> Franz Koch schrieb:
> 
>> why does the extension name need to be changed? I can only speak for 
>> myself, but if there where two extensions in TER doing the same, one 
>> called 'tx_party' and one called 'wec_people' - I'd definitely install 
>> 'tx_party', because 'wec_people' is assuming that it's not a general 
>> extension due to the personalized extension key (like it is for 98% of 
>> the extensions in TER that are rubbish).
>>
>> The only extension with a extension key like 'wec_whatever' that I've 
>> tested is 'wec_maps' - and that only because of 'tx_cal' (which is 
>> also WEC powered, but doesn't have a personalized ext key).
>>
>> So I share Davids thoughts - you will get much more support if the 
>> extension key is not 'wec_whatever'. I think everybody would benefit 
>> if the name of the 'main' party extensions remains 'tx_party' and that 
>> 'wec_people' is a addon, preconfiguring 'tx_party' for 
>> churches/ministrys, that are to specific for a general party extension.
>>
>> That's at least for me the idea behind a ECT driven extension.

I'll just offer one other bit of information on the naming change. With 
the rename, the main desire wasn't to put wec in front of the extension. 
  For native English speakers, calling the extension "party" has a 
strange connotation. People was a more natural fit for the primary usage 
so that was really the main point of the rename.  Since we were renaming 
it anyway, we just brought it under the wec namespace.

If there really are major objections to having wec in front of the 
extension name, we can certainly revisit that.  The WEC leadership will 
be much more likely to support this if its a shared development effort 
with the rest of the TYPO3 community (as in the case of Calendar Base) 
as opposed to renaming something that is completely an internal project.

> First, I fully agree with Franz.
> 
> I was at David Brühlmeier's talk at T3DD07 and as far as I remember 
> there were some people who wanted to help in developing tx_party. There 
> were also some names in the TYPO3 wiki who offered there help.
> 
> But I didn't see any progress in tx_party since T3DD07 and that's still 
> the case since it is renamed to wec_people. One reason was may be that 
> for a long time the OASIS standard wasn't officially released. That 
> changed on 19. March 2008 and still nothing happened.
> 
> I think that, if there would have been more clearly defined tasks there 
> would have been more people who would have helped in developing 
> tx_party. I thought that David Brühlmeier as the former project leader 
> would have taken this step and defined some tasks.

The wiki still has a wealth of party information, including the 
components and subtasks that David originally defined.  He indicated on 
several occasions that his efforts to define the roadmap and the 
different components that people could work on resulted in no community 
participation at all.

I don't say that to point fingers, because I'm also part of that 
community. The history is just that the development community did not 
get involved for whatever reason despite initial interest on the mailing 
lists and at various events. David needed to move on to other things and 
handed development to WEC since there wasn't another clear group that 
could pick it up.

We haven't moved at the pace we'd like due to other projects, but at 
least there's still a heartbeat :)

> If I had some clearly defined tasks to choose from I would have taken 
> one off the list and helped developing it. But I didn't know where to 
> start.

Does that offer still stand? :)

> As the demand for such a extension increases obviously (see the posts on 
> the mailling lists the last months asking for tx_party) I think it is 
> more than ever an important topic for the ECT. And I think it was a bad 
> idea to take tx_party out of the ECT and moving it out to the WEC.


Practically speaking, I'm not sure what moving it out of ECT and into 
WEC means.  The Subversion repository has moved, but is still publicly 
available and we're happy to give any contributing developer write 
access. We're certainly not trying to close the project to the outside 
world or tailor it to only our needs.

WEC is all for partnering with others in the TYPO3 Community for 
development (as we have with Calendar Base) so lets figure out what we 
can do as a team to build on this discussion and push tx_party / 
wec_people ahead in concrete ways.

Who is willing to commit to help?  What areas of tx_party / wec_people 
are of the most interest to you (reporting, synchronization, frontend 
views, etc)?

Thanks,
Jeff