TYPO3 workspaces

Posted: June 15th, 2010 | Author: tolleiv | Tags: , | 1 Comment »

One of the enterprise features TYPO3 has to offer is versioning and workspace handling. Kasper did a great job when he initially brough these featues into TYPO3. Unfortunately during the last years they became orphans and nobody really took care of them. There are multiple reasons for that, one was that Kasper didn’t allow big changes, another one was that everyone was somehow able to live with the existing odds they had but probable the most important one was that it was just to complicated to improve them alone without knowing the big picture.

The good news is that these times are over and that some important changes to improve workspace handling are planned for
the upcomming TYPO3 4.5 (read more on TYPO3.org) and the cool news is that I was lucky enough to be part of that team and that I was able to attend a great “kickoff” meeting two weeks ago.

What changes we plan can be found on TYPO3.org, a detailed protocol of the meeting can be found here in addition.

I’m happy to be part of that and I hope everyone on the team can keep up his/her motivation.

tiny update…

Posted: May 8th, 2010 | Author: tolleiv | Tags: , | Comments Off

I’m pretty busy in these days and unfortunately there’s not much time to write blogposts. In detail there’s currently a long list of feature wishes and bugs for TemplaVoila which need my attention and in addition I also already started to prepare a workshop for the T3DD10 about Git*.

Just to keep this blog alive this is what I found interesting during the last weeks:

For TYPO3 enthusiasts especially the changes within the TYPO3 Core regarding the integration of further T3UX09 results and all the small changes which happen to get 4.4 ready might be of the biggest interest (https://svn.typo3.org/TYPO3v4/Core/trunk/ChangeLog). Besides that Sebastian Kurfürst tweeted that he finished the last chapter of his Extbase/Fluid book and Amazon says that they deliver it in the first weeks of July. I think once his book is out we’ll see much more people starting to work with Extbase and Fluid.
It also seems that the TYPO3 v5 project — called “Phoenix” — is getting more and more relevant. They decided to scrumify the delvelopment and started to do Sprints to achieve quick and visible results. Sounds like a good way to go – let’s see how long they keep that up. Besides that there’s also an interesting mail Robert Lemke posted in a newsgroup to answer the rumors about the why v5 takes so long and why they had to start from scratch and so on – very interesting statements.

Besides that you might like these bits and bytes:

*If anyone wants to help with the Git workshop or has suggestions feel free to contact me. I don’t feel really prepared for it yet but I also think that someone has to present Git to the TYPO3 community since Subversion kinda sucks in certain aspects – also the workshop itself is not confirmed yet but I’m pretty sure it will happen since lot’s of people are interested to hear about it.

Crawler 3.1 release + podcast

Posted: April 1st, 2010 | Author: tolleiv | Tags: , , , | Comments Off

Nearly a month after version 3.0.5, we published 3.1.0 of the well known crawler extension today. The main work for that step was related to several bugfixes, a better scheduler integration, some CLI-API enhancements, better testcases and (finally) some documentation updates. Most kudos go to Michael Klapper who took over the responsibility for this release and who also fixed a decent amount of bugs.
You can download the extension in the TER and hopefully this time OpenOffice didn’t trick us again and you’ll be able to see a shiny new extension manual on typo3.org as well.

Besides that, Kasper just released the podcast with me talking about version 3.0 of the crawler and about further improvements for the staticpub extension. You’ll find that on typo3.org/podcasts/kasper.

TemplaVoila 1.4.2 released

Posted: March 16th, 2010 | Author: tolleiv | Tags: , , | 5 Comments »

Yesterday the 2nd team release of TemplaVoila was uploaded into the TER. It’s basically a maintenance release which fixes more than 100 bugs. But since we haven’t been that straight distinguishing between bug and usability feature, you’ll see a couple of new things within this release.

The high level release notes are:

  • page module is now customizable with CSS and JavaScript
  • handling of static data structures are improved and fully working now
  • wizards are improved, new page wizard is more explaining
  • visual cleanups
  • new hooks for eTypes (elements added by mapping interface)
  • new classes for preview in page module, easy to override by extensions
  • added missing localisations
  • enhanced drag-and-drop in page module
  • over 100 Bugs are fixed
  • updated manual

During the installation your TYPO3 Extension Manager will ask to perform a couple of database upgrades. These upgrades aren’t really critical because they just enlarge some database fields, which will make sure that your data really fit’s in.

Just to point one thing out – especially the page module has been improved to be more flexible in certain parts.

These lines of TSConfig can be used to add CSS or JavaScript into the page module and enable easy customizations:

mod.web_txtemplavoilaM1.stylesheet = ../fileadmin/css/tvpagemodule.css

mod.web_txtemplavoilaM1.javascript {
  file1 = ../fileadmin/templates/js/jquery.js
  file2 = ../fileadmin/templates/css/backend.js
}

Further customizations is provided using the “mod.web_txtemplavoilaM1.blindIcons” configuration or with individual content preview classes (configured though “$GLOBALS['TYPO3_CONF_VARS']['EXTCONF']['templavoila']['mod1']['renderPreviewContent']” – see ext_localconf.php).

We haven’t discussed what the direction for the next versions really looks like. From my perspective better TYPO3 integration, some kind of code cleanup and also the integration of some features which arise with TYPO3 4.4 will be somehow on our schedule. But since TemplaVoila isn’t a one man show anymore, this isn’t just my decision and in addition I’d like to encourage everyone to send feedback, bugfixes or new features just to give us an impression what you like or dislike in the current version.

Last but not least, I’d like to thank everyone who was somehow involved in the release, especially Steffen Kamper who shared lot of inspiration and who has spent many hours to debug and fix some really tricky issues.

Re: Farewell, TemplaVoila!

Posted: March 4th, 2010 | Author: tolleiv | Tags: , | 8 Comments »

Dmitry decided to leave the TemplaVoilà project today and he handed the extension-leadership to me. Since this is a very abrupt change and since there was lot’s of (mis)communication involved I’d like to use this blogpost to answer his “Farewell, TemplaVoila!” post (he turned off the commenting function).

As you might know Steffen Kamper and I joined the TemplaVoilà team some time ago and since Dmitry wasn’t very motivated to maintain the extension anymore, we took over and tried to make TemplaVoilà ready for TYPO3 4.3 (see Dmitry’s clarification below). We also tried to get rid of the over 250 listed bugs from bugs.typo3.org. This went fine for quite some time and we released version 1.4.0 and 1.4.1 in November parallel to TYPO3 4.3. Unfortunately the release come a little too fast for us and a couple of major bugs couldn’t be fixed by that time. After that release we had a meeting with Dmitry and we all agreed to release 1.4.2 in the beginning of January. We found and fixed tons of bugs and also implemented long awaited features in the meantime. We also had the luck that others found new motivation and started to send feedback and started to test TemplaVoilà with us. (Special thanks to Uschi, Jeff and Ron).
Three weeks ago we decided that the current state is “ready to release” and we told Dmitry that it’s up to him to release 1.4.2. Quite some time passed by and today he used several channels (Twitter, Facebook and Newsgroups) to tell the world what he found:

No TV 1.4.2 release soon. Found a bug in page module with unlinking in 1 minute after starting tests. I am severely disappointed by this :(

He was right – a very obvious bug showed up in the page-module within TYPO3 4.2. Unfortunately nobody saw it and it also seems that some of us are still unable to reproduce it. Anyways — in my opinion — he choose the wrong way to communicate that. Instead of talking to Steffen and me, he decided to talk to anyone else. I wrote him a mail and told him that I didn’t like the way he brought this up and asked for a Skype meeting to discuss how to proceed. After serveral emails back and forth and after others joined the communication, Dmitry decided (without anyone of us asking for it) to leave the team and hand over the leadership. To make it clear to everyone: the discussion started because of one JavaScript error and a few icons in the backend which he didn’t like very much. The Skype meeting never happend – although it would have saved lot’s of time and confusion for all of us.

I’m not very happy with his decision, because this leaves lot’s of questions and because we loose a very diligent developer. But it seems that there’s currently no way to convince him that he might be wrong.

As team Steffen and I will try to continue the development and improvement of TemplaVoilà, especially because it’s one of the most important benefits TYPO3 can offer. I ask everyone to join and contribute some time for testing or feedback. I dislike Dmitry’s approach to fork TemplaVoila and host it somewhere else (see Dmitry’s clarification below). I’m inviting him to rejoin the team at any time and work in a constructive way with us. I’m still convinced that all this just happend because miscommunication and not because of “real” issues.

—
In addition it also seems that others offended Dmitry and asked him not to stop the process anymore – I understand his distraction. He did a very good job in the past, he was open for our improvements and his biggest concern was quality not power or money or anything. Being offended for something you do in your freetime without any payment and being offended by people, who earn money from their clients with your (free) work, is always distracting. Please think about that in future communications with any open source software developer.

—
If you wonder how to get in touch with us: http://bugs.typo3.org lists all known bugs and their status. Report new bugs there or try to add new information to existing ones. Team discussion, in regards to fixed bugs or new features, happens, compareable to the TYPO3 Core, in the “typo3.team.templavoila” list on “lists.typo3.org”. If you need regular feedback or help with TemplaVoilà please use the “typo3.projects.templavoila” list.

—
* Update 05.03.2010: After I posted that the link to that blogpost on Facebook, Dmitry commented it and just to be fair, that’s what he said:

Thanks for your post. It is fair and explains the situation well. I would only clarify two moments: (1) I am not forking TV but creating a version for myself. I do not plan to release it to TER or anywhere. It is a TV for me as personally I like it (2) “Dmitry wasn’t very motivated to maintain the extension anymore” is not exactly so, rather to my taste TV already did all it had to do. I invited others to move TV further because I did not need anything else from it. Thanks again.

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