Last week we met with a group of more than 40 members of the core and security team plus additional active members of the community for the TYPO3 Codesprint Berlin. Technische Universität Berlin provided us with enough space again for discussing ideas, new concepts and actually implementing some of them right away. Besides having great coffee we also decided on the next steps for TYPO3 4.6, 5.0 and FLOW3.
The goal for this meeting was not so much achieving visible results but rather to foster communication and exchange of ideas between the team members and kickstart implementations or try out solutions. Measured on this scale, the week was a great success because many new topics popped up which we couldn't have planned for before the meeting.
On the arrival day we started with a recap and some presentations outlining the current state of TYPO3 4.x, TYPO3 Phoenix and FLOW3. While those parts get you a really unproductive feeling (one guy talking, the rest listening) it was necessary to bring the whole team up to speed. I for my part spent most of the time with Phoenix and FLOW3 related topics, which makes my summary a bit biased.
The hostel we booked for most of the team was ... uhm ... rather underwhelming and we'll surely not choose it again. But despite the hard first night on thin mattresses the v4 team dove right into Git, Gerrit and Jenkins. Weeks before a team led by Peter Niederlag and Karsten Dambekalns had prepared the migration from Subversion to Git for the TYPO3 v4 branch – including the well-proven workflow with Gerrit and Jenkins we already introduced for FLOW3 and TYPO3 Phoenix. The migration went flawless but many devs had to handle the Git-first-day shock and get used to the new review tools.
Xavier Perseguers (from Switzerland) was elected as the release manager for TYPO3 4.6. While he outlined a few of the plans for the next TYPO3 version, he also revealed the code name for version 4.6: "--rebase".
Did I mention the coffee? After our bad experience with greyish water from the local vending machine, Ben van't Ende organized a professional Barista including some luxury equipment who made sure we had some proper espresso and cafe latte for our sessions. This was only possible of course due to our generous sponsors – thanks a lot to you guys!
During the sprint the Phoenix team went through open tasks and decided on which to solve in which order. As we are currently working on a real website based on TYPO3 Phoenix, its demands were the natural driver and goal setter for use while we prioritized the next features. Another big topic we're currently addressing is the cleanup and finalization of the two big refactorings (Doctrine 2 support and new proxy mechanism) we recently applied to FLOW3. As a result TYPO3 Phoenix now finally works on top of Doctrine and the all new object management. Once we have optimized and documented these new features, they'll give developers an awesome user experience, you'll see ;-)
Present members of the UI team (ie. Jens, Berit, Aske, Christian and Rens) agreed on a transparent workflow for the whole concept-design-implementation-qa cycle and discussed steps to improve communication with the team. Aske, who is our newest member in the team, implemented the page position selector which editors need for creating new pages. Other features we tackled during the week were creation and deletion of content elements, moving existing pages and the switch to ExtJS 4.0.
Of course there was also some nice water cooler talk (well, espresso machine talk) circling around common projects for both, the v4 and v5 team. We talked about image building and conversion (aka GIFBUILDER 2), file abstraction layer and resource handling, a common design for the dashboard and of course quirks and other character traits of Gerrit & Jenkins.
In total it was an inspiring and also fruitful sprint – not so much on the global side, with big results to present, but many details and future plans could be addressed. I guess most of us left with a idea of where we're going next – and with a cold, because the hostel didn't feature artight windows or warming blankets.
There are a bunch of photos from the code sprint in my and Steffen's flickr albums.
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