[TYPO3-hci] Slightly OT: Is the current 4.5 Roadmap wrong?

[Kasper Skårhøj]

Hi Philip,

I largely agree with your analysis of the situation. However, while  
developing version 5.0 we need to do something about version 4.5. I  
would claim that the main product of the work on 4.5 should NOT be  
the implementation of improved usability but the KNOWLEDGE acquired -  
which feeds directly into 5.0 development. So I have no problem with  
hacking the 4.0 code to improve usability even if its a dead end.  
There are a LOT of users out there who can't wait for version 5.0.

- kasper




On Jun 16, 2006, at 17:02 , Phillip wrote:

> Hi.
> Yesterday night I took the time to install the T3 Database localy and
> reverse engineer it into Eclipse/Clay.
> 32 tables. Zero DB level relations enforced with foreign keys.
> Within seconds I found at least 2 large things that would need
> normalization imediately, before attempting anything else. After
> browsing the model for a few minutes you could literaly see where
> Kasper or some other Coredev went into a coding spree and added some
> new feature. Recognizable either by field-naming or entity-clusters
> with simular naming. Don't get me wrong: This is no critique. T3 is
> historically grown and that allways shows in software of this size.
> Coding is done by humans and with a specific result in mind at a
> given time. And one can also overdo it with abstraction and design.
> Besides, I've looked at the guts other PHP/MySQL CMSes and compared
> to some of them T3 is the hallmark of clean design. :-)
> On top of that, we all know that back then and up to a year ago MySQL
> wasn't a Database but more some kind of Flatfile with an SQL
> Frontend. And that it really didn't matter wether you had a datamodel
> or not. You'd just write the stuff whereever you felt it would fit at
> the time.
> But PHP and MySQL finally have arived in th big league. Given that
> the system requirements for T3 are at the top end of PHP CMSes anyway
> I'd say one needn't hesitate and require a minimum of MySQL 5 and PHP
> 5.1 for the next major version of T3.
>
> But the most important thing to BE design is: I honestly am starting
> to think we should consider the old T3 finished. The post-classic
> frame-based backend got a new skin this year. It looks a little
> better *and* still is what the year long crowd of T3 backend users is
> used to. Shouldn't we just do a little maintainance, content
> abstraction and naming cleanup for 4.5 and leave it at that? Instead
> focus on tearing T3 apart and rebuilding it from scratch while
> accepting the proven usage concepts as a given, but building an
> entirely new persistance layer, offloading object-relational logic to
> lower parts of the system. We could totally abstract the BE and make
> a larger attempt to streamline the backend GUI. The possiblities are
> endless. I'd rather stick with the current BE knowing that we'll have
> a new Architecture in place faster and then will be able to do lots
> of neat BE stuff.
>
> What I'm saying here is that not only the state of the backend and
> the fact that it's sort of arived in a fully developed 'dead-end'
> situation but also the state of T3 as a whole actually asks for
> moving a total GUI redo to a place where we have a post-5.0 situation.
>
> I could imagine that this topic has been discussed already or is
> being discussed among coredevs right now. Are there any conclusions
> to this allready?
>
> Phillip
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- kasper

"A contribution a day keeps the fork away"
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