Speeding up the React UI development with your help: funding

As we announced during Neos Conference and in previous blog articles, we would love to deprecate the current EmberJS based Neos backend with the release of Neos 3.3 LTS at the end of this year. However, as we are an open source project which is largely developed during spare time or between paid projects, we cannot guarantee that we will be able to spend enough time on the React UI to get it to the quality we desire and you deserve.

Everyone who has worked with the beta of the React UI has given us extremely positive feedback. They love the speed, CKEditor stability, the iframe approach, the extensibility and the list goes on. We want to use it in projects ourselves and want to see most Neos instances switch to it after its release.

To get there, we want to do the remaining development until version 1.0 of the React UI as a focussed software project, with fixed timelines, clear goals and commitments.

We estimate that 50.000€ are needed as budget to guarantee:

• the finalization of the React UI for Neos 3.3 LTS in December 2017
• develop all missing features and fix any blocking or critical bugs as mentioned in this GitHub issue
  • file upload editor in inspector
  • search and filter the node tree
  • assets editor
  • data sources in select editor
  • editing the URL path of the current page
  • and of course fixing lots of bugs

You can help to make this project a reality! We have created funding badges (similar to when we worked on our branding) that allow you to support the funding of the React UI:

To be able to realistically deliver on our commitment, we need to achieve the following sums by 31st August 2017:

• If we reach at least 30.000€ in funding, we guarantee that we will be able to release a stable React UI with Neos 3.3 LTS. 
• If we reach 50.000€ in funding, we will have at least 20 days for thorough testing and bugfixing, leading to a greatly decreased number of bugs in the stable release.

What happens if we do not reach our funding goal? We will get in touch with supporters who provided 5.000€ or 2.000€ individually. Support of 500€ or less will be used to boost the development of the React UI, however scaled to the available funds.

We want to treat this as a professional project, with the same time, budget and scope commitments we give in our day-to-day projects at our agencies. This means:

• Project Lead: Sebastian Kurfürst, who is a project lead from the Neos team with lots of experience in the new React UI, will coordinate development and project management.
• Experienced developers from the team who have already written most of the code will be involved in the project (like Wilhelm Behnke, Max Strübing, Dmitri Pisarev).
• tasks and responsibilities will be assigned to participating developers
• Delivery Guarantee: We are confident with our estimate, as we have already gone more than 80% of the way. Thus we treat this as a fixed price project with a delivery guarantee.
• Transparency: We will be transparent about progress and release new betas regularly to account for the money we spent.

This Discuss post explains our project management and controlling approach in full.

If you support the accelerated finalization of the React UI with 5.000€ or more, you will get a great return: You can give us one of your projects and we will test it with the new UI for three days. This is a win-win-win situation!

1. You benefit from the core team fixing React UI bugs that occur in your project and get tips where further work will be needed (if any) and possibly further hints too!
2. Your customer is likely to get the React UI sooner which will make their editors extremely happy.
3. We will be able to find and fix a lot more bugs that might otherwise still be in the 1.0 release and thus deliver a better quality software to you and the community.

To be clear, here is what we will not do as part of the React UI testing:

• we will not fix bugs in your project setup
• we will not fix bugs in your templating, CSS
• we will not modify your project's source code

If we spot some issues, we will give you feedback (e.g. if there is installation trouble, or anything preventing us from doing the testing).

Requirements for project testing:

You can provide us either

• a git repository (or zip file of the full distribution) of a Neos 3.0 or newer website. (the upgrade to Neos 3.x is of course not included.)
• a Data/Persistent dump
• a DB dump (formatted in UTF-8, as it is the Flow default)
• a readme what other services and versions are needed (we can only test Elasticsearch, Redis, Beanstalkd) and how to start them
• the website has to run through "./flow server:run"

or alternatively:

• a docker based setup which starts and initializes everything correctly using "docker-compose up".

It would also help us if you provide a list of 3-5 areas to test specifically for (e.g. specialities of the website).

Note: if you created custom (ember-based) inspector editors, they have to be manually ported to React; this is not covered here.

The new React UI is the next big thing in Neos and will provide a tremendous user experience boost for all editors. It will take the editor user experience that sets Neos apart to a new level.

This is your chance to help us achieve this goal until the end of the year. As a dedicated project with a delivery guarantee.

Should you have any questions related to this funding initiative, please get in touch with

1. Sebastian Kurfürst (on vacation from 21st July - 13th August) at +49 351 4189 562, or sebastian (at) neos.io, or on Slack (@sebastian)
2. Gina Steiner at +49 40 328193 120, or gina (at) neos.io, or on Slack (@gina)
3. Christian Müller at +49 172 1091412, or christian (at) neos.io, or on Slack (@christianm)

Thank you!