Code Sprint June 2014

The Neos/Flow team met for another code sprint at Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TU/e) in the Netherlands leading up to the developer days. Three days were spent focussing on improving our tools, communication, discussing organizational matters, working on upcoming features and ended with finalizing the release of 1.1. The code sprint was medium sized with 13 participants in total.

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Tools & communication

The team has been evaluating a new project management tool called Jira for some time and work went into getting the necessary steps done for being able to use it. This is still an ongoing project and more news about that will come, but so far it’s looking very promising. Issues reported in the old tracker (forge) will still be seen, but it’s encouraged to report to the new system instead. You can use your typo3.org account to log in.

Additionally the team set up new emails for neos (at) typo3.org and flow (at) typo3.org that goes directly to a service desk in Jira that several team members have access to. This is done to avoid single points of failure and to speed up response times.

To ease the review process a new automatic coding guidelines cleanup task is in the making, which check the formal style of code reviews so the developers can focus on the important parts of reviewing. Current state is available here.


Organizational matters

One of the main topics of the code sprint was dealing with some of organizational challenges the team are facing. The release management and process was discussed to make the task more explicit, defining and describing the process as well as the responsibilities of the release manager. You can read more about it on the website. In addition to release management the team realised the feature development workflow had to be improved. This was realised after seeing the amount of work required for releasing 1.1, which took a lot longer than anticipated. From now on new features are not allowed to go into the core unless they are documented, provide tests and include release notes. This is done to prevent a pile up of work required for finalizing a release, additionally it should improve the completeness of features.

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The team discussing organizational matters.

Improvements for the website were discussed and certain parts were updated, including the download instructions to make them more clear. Other technical improvements were also done. Additionally the review process was discussed and how to handle it in a good way, which will help new contributors and keeping the number of open reviews limited.

Realizing that the Flow website needs a caring hand the team planned to update the Flow website based on the Neos website and work has already begun to achieve that. If anybody would be interested in helping out with this project, please get in contact with us at flow (at) typo3.org.


Upcoming features

No code sprint without working on some interesting new features. At this code sprint that included finalising placeholder support for inline editing, global content constraints, translation of the user interface, content translation, a configuration module, tabbed inspector, inspector text area editor, improving TypoScript, fine-grained access controls and many other things. Most of which have been in progress for quite some time already and still have many things to do before they’re finishing, while others managed to be finished during the code sprint. More information about the upcoming features to come.


Releasing 1.1

The team put a lot of effort into finish releasing 1.1 before the developer days and could happily announce the release about an hour prior to the opening of the developer days. This was important to the team since the team had a clear goal of improving adoption by the community. Thanks to Christian Müller for effectively taking on the role of release manager of this release. You can read more about the release in the release article.

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The team celebrating releasing 1.1 just before the developer days.


Roadmap

The team got together and discussed a proposed roadmap and selected Aske Ertmann as the release manager of the upcoming 1.2 release. More information about release dates and features coming.


Participants

Out of the 13 participants, the code sprint welcomed three new first timers, including Visay Keo from Web Essentials and Dominik Stankowski, member of the EAB, both joining from Cambodia. Thanks to all the participants and a special thanks to Rens Admiraal, Patrick Broens and TU/e for organising the sprint.

In addition Bastian Waidelich and Andreas Förthner had their own little code sprint remotely at the same time focussing on fine-grained access control.


Upcoming code sprints

There are two code sprints in the planning for the third quarter of 2014. First one will be a smaller/short one in August (25th - 31st) planned to take place in northern Germany. If you’d like to participate please write to the mailing list.

Next up is a code sprint not to be missed. Following the success of the Copenhagen code sprint in 2012 which was held on a houseboat, the team is planning a repeating the formula of having a single location that accommodates work and living arrangements. This is much more effective and also cheaper compared to renting hotel rooms. The plan is to have a large number (16-32) of participants and to have a whole week, e.g. saturday till saturday. The location will probably be somewhere in Denmark, depending on the amount of participants either in a castle or a big summer house. The location will be sponsored and depending on how many participants the travel expenses will be fully reimbursed. The sprint is planned to take place in week 40 (29/9–3/10) and to plan the event the organizers need to know who plans to participate since finding a location depends a lot on how many participants. As always the team welcomes new contributors to our code sprints with one simple rule being that you have some Neos experience and can mostly work on your own. Especially contributors with frontend knowledge (JavaScript, CSS) are needed. Hope to see you there