Association Activity Report
Event Committee
T3BOARD08
Maybe a shock to all who did not
register so far: T3BOARD08, the TYPO3
Snowboard Tour,
is completely sold out. Might you still want to go, there still is the
possibility to register on the reserves list. Most of the time
we had quite a lot of cancellations
due to people having to finish a job
or similar reasons. Please ask
organiser
Monika Ingold (monika.ingold@laax.com) to put you on the reserves
list if you
were late for registration.
It might also help to register to the
T3BOARD mailing list, where
people sometimes offer their tickets at the last moment.
T3DD07
The second edition of another
international TYPO3 community event, the TYPO3 Developer
Days
(T3DD), was very successful and also super to attend, measuring the
responses we got
from attendees. Everybody was enthusiastic
about the event, the quality of the
workshop and the overall
atmosphere that dominated it. If you really want to stay ahead in
TYPO3 development while in the meantime having a say in it, this now
is the event to go
or send your developers to.
T3CON07
The international TYPO3
conference [1] has opened up
for
registration. The conference program is of very high quality this
year and mainly focuses on
technical topics. One of
the highlights will
probably be the presentation of the (status of
the) 5.0 framework by Robert Lemke and
Daniel Hinderink. Aside from
TYPO3-related talks there will be some great ‚outsiders‘ with
strong
presentations. Like Prof. Dr. Frank Thissen speaking about
‚user
oriented communication‘ or Andrei Zmievski, Chief Architect
of Outspark
Inc., giving a talk about PHP 6 Unicode and i18n
and another one about PHP-GTK 2. He has
done lots of inside jobs for
Yahoo, so you might expect a lot from him. Then there’s
David
Nuescheler, the JCR spec lead and CTO of Day Software, talking about real world applications.
Altogether a strong program which makes this
event, combined with
its networking possibilities, really a must go.
Quality Control Committee
Certification Team
As mentioned in the last quarterly
report, all energy and funding of the Quality Control
Committee is
devoted to the Certification Team. The summer was also rather quiet
for the
team. As members were having holidays in different periods
each, the quarterly team meeting
was postponed to August. The most
important open tasks are the programming of a
good testing
extension, creating the questions and finding an official testing
partner, a
certification company that can deliver both the
infrastructure for testing as wellas the tools needed for the
certification process. Negotiations with two world
market leaders in
the field have taken a lot of time and energy, without resulting in a convenient
agreement so far.
Research & Development Committee
Core / 4.x Team
The development of TYPO3 4.2 officially took off with the core
developers‘ meeting at the T3DD07 in Dietikon. Since Kasper resigned
from
active TYPO3 development and handed over the project leadership
to Michael Stucki, the
TYPO3 4.x team was also in need of a new
release manager. The current idea is to have
a new release manager
for each TYPO3 4.x version. For the 4.2 release Ingo Renner and
Rupert Germann were chosen to be the release managers. During a 4.2
brainstorming
session, the first feature ideas were collected from
the attending developers and were
then put on the typo3.org wiki and
extended by the core developers. The planned features
for TYPO3 4.2 include:
- UTF8 support by default
- Drop of support for PHP4,
requiring at least PHP5.2 - Install Tool 2.0
- TypoScript editor with code
highlighting - Back end and front end
Performance Improvements
Currently, the work is in progress and the release of alpha 1 will come soon.
After the release, a tool for donations from the
public shall be set
up at typo3.org. There is currently not a lot of sponsoring coming
in
for the 4.x team, which is obviously slowing down development a
bit. For more details on
the upcoming release, check out the
Roadmap [2].
5.0 Team
During the last weeks, the framework
has evolved impressively. Influenced by best practices
from all
sorts of frameworks and GUI toolkits, Robert Lemke rewrote the MVC
part of the
framework. They
even have a beautiful ‚default
view‘ by now. Unlike in other
frameworks, the 5.0 Team [3] doesn’t want to provide just
scaffolding,
but rather a solid building to work in. This will allow developers to
focus on
business logic. Coding interfaces will be as easy as it
gets. For example, developers will be
able to use Ajax without
needing to use JavaScript anymore.
After a lively and productive
discussion on the TYPO3 5.0 mailinglist, the syntax
of
TypoScript was carefully changed and refined, written down as EBNF
and finally a new
parser saw the light of day. The result is a more
consistent TypoScript than ever, being
parsed into an object tree on
PHP level, thus making live easier for PHP and TS developers
alike.
The CMS package already implements some TypoScript objects, such as
Text and
ContentArray, with more to come. In the near future, this
will be coordinated by Andreas Förthner,
who has joined the team a short
while ago. Welcome Andreas!
The team has dropped the target of
implementing JSR-170 as TYPO3 Content Repository, and went for JSR-283 instead. First results can be seen at
the TYPO3 5.0
development server [4].
Talking about the development server
brings us to the next topic: the consequences of
spearheading in
technology. The 5.0 Team has encountered lots of bugs in PHP6 and
keeping a test infrastructure running proves to be much harder
than expected. Due to
incompatibilities of phpDocumentor and Phing
with PHP6, automated unit testing and
generation of the API
documentation on the development server is not working. The
team
is desperately in need of a real PHP6 specialist or somebody with the
talent and skills to
solve these issues. If you feel obligated or
think this is your call, please contact them.
The 5.0 Team will present their results to a broader public at the T3CON07 in Karlsruhe next month. Another good
reason to attend the conference.
Security Team
As always, the Security Team has been
one of the most active teams with their continuous
efforts to make
TYPO3 the most secure system on the market. But especially
the load
of reviewing and testing extensions is
extremely hard to manage. So, might
you be able and willing to help
them out in this aspect, please contact the team [5].
Communication Committee
Communication Team
With the TYPO3 project growing to a scale larger
than we have
ever seen before, we felt the need to organise communication in a
more solid
way, so the Communication Team has been resurrected. With only three members the team will
start out very small and, in the first place, take care of Press Releases, news items and articles on
the websites. They will also be involved in writing
content for the
newly to be built typo3.org website. More about this team will follow
on
news.typo3.org.