Workspaces & Versioning

Today in our every 2-week workspace meeting, we talked about our goals for workspace and version extension in TYPO3 4.7. The result is the following list.

Topic: Further cleanup and bugfixing of workspace and version extension
Contact: Tolleiv Nietsch, Benni Mack, Stefan Neufeind

Topic: Language selector in workspace preview (as soon as L is the default language var in TYPO3 4.7)
Contact: Sonja Scholz, Tolleiv Nietsch, Benni Mack

Topic: Small improvements in the history entry when a workspace change gets published
Contact: Sonja Scholz

Topic: DAM/FAL Workspace Support - first we need a concept
Contact: Benni Mack, Steffen Ritter, Olly Hader, Lorenz Ulrich

Topic: Improve handling of translations during Workspace process (first we need to analyse the current process and create a concept how it should be)
Contact: Stefan Neufeind

Topic: 4-eyes principle option, which makes sure that the autor of a change cannot publish it (per default=off)
Contact: Marco Bresch, Sonja Scholz

Topic: ExtJs 4 Migration
Contact: Steffen Ritter, Tolleiv Nietsch

If you are interested in workspace and would like to help, you are always very welcome! Please contact the responsible contact person of your favourite topic directly.

Inspire people to share!

Greets,

Sonja

As you might have already read on news.typo3.org a team was formed, that works on workspace improving it in several areas.

TYPO3 Developer Days¶

At T3DD10 a workshop about workspaces was held by Oliver Hader. The Workspace Team is excited to have attracted some new members while participating in the workshop. The workshop-participants combinedly worked in groups on different parts of workspaces.

The first group started new documentation. At the moment there is hardly any documentation around, which is definitely necessary for such a complex system. The group split and updated the existing information about workspaces from "Inside TYPO3" and decided to extract this information into at least three separate workspace documents. The idea is basically to have one document for every target group. One for the end-user, one for the administrator and a third aimed at developers.

A second group worked on existing bugs, cleaning up the bug tracker, marking duplicates or outdated bugs as well as reviewing and even committing fixes.

The third group initiated an extension API in order to provide the non-extbase developers with the knowledge and documentation to support workspaces in their own extension.

The fourth group discussed remaining work on the new custom stages feature. Until now, there are pre defined stages in the workspaces work flow.

For future versions of workspaces the team aims to have any number of configurable stages anywhere between "Edit" and "Ready to publish" in order to represent a companies organisational structure. The configuration of these custom stages can be managed in the workspace configuration. A working prototype has already been integrated into a development branch of TYPO3.

Team communication¶

Motivated by the spirit of the Developer Days two weeks ago there had been a first team Skype meeting this last Tuesday. Besides precisely defining the tasks that lay ahead, providing everyone with a task and setting up deadlines we decided that all our communication and task-management (bugs, to do's, documentation, extension api, .) will be stored on forge within the already existing project typo3v4-workspaces¹.

Please report bugs, issues and feature requests belonging to workspaces at the issue tracker on forge. The already existing bugs will still be handled on http://bugs.typo3.org, but referenced on forge.

Furthermore there has been a decision to meet every second week on Skype to discuss current work, progress and the next steps.

Future goals¶

The next steps on the way to TYPO3 4.5 are finishing the work we began at the T3DD10. A major task is refactoring the existing code, and working on usability with the TYPO3 design team. On the long run, the goals of the workspace team will be to have a better documentation and to simplify the workspaces feature for everyone, the developer, the administrator and, of course, the end user.

To reach our goals we organize two Code Sprints at July 31th and end of September.
If you want to help out developing, documenting or any other kind of support you are highly appreciated to join our forge project and/or team-meeting.

The next Team-Meeting will take place on August 3th, 6pm. Just contact Sonja (ss@cabag.ch) or Ben (ben@typo3.org) if you want to participate.

Sponsoring¶

If you are a company that uses workspaces or a company that implements workspaces, we would like you to consider sponsoring the development of the workspaces project. The members of the team put in a lot of their spare time. Just contact Sonja or Ben if you are willing to sponsor part of the development or maybe even the pizza dinner we have while coding.

[1] http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v4-workspaces

On June 1st 2010 a team-meeting took place in Wiesabden to strengthen the work of this project.

The meeting was very productiv and we are quite hapy with the recent efforts being made to improve the overall usability and working of versioning and workspaces in TYPO3.

Currently we are working to get some tiny preparations/improvements integrated into the 4.4 release.

The major overhaul is expected to start soon after the relase of 4.4.

read a more elaborate summary at: http://news.typo3.org/news/article/bringing-workspaces-up-to-speed/

You can find these slides on slideshare.net:
http://www.slideshare.net/MathiasSchreiber/workspaces

we had a nice meeting at the T3DD09 (http://t3dd09.typo3.org) and hopefully started to form a successfull team

We are proud to announce the first stable version of the advanced staging improvement for workspaces.
Currently its developed for TYPO3 4.2.6 because of testing. On next time we will migrate it to 4.3.

We would be very pleased if you could have a look at the commited features and add your comment to the related issues in the workspace project.

For a fast overview you can also have a short look at these screenshots: Workspace screenshots

General¶

The target of this subproject is to improve workspaces of TYPO3 in the following points:

• Rewrite of staging and mailing process
• Improve the labels/translations in workspace
• Easy preview method for Extensions
• Several bugfixes related to workspace handling

Parts of the development are sponsored by cab services ag

Rewrite of staging and mailing process¶

The target is, to have the stages (Publish, Editing, Review) of a
workspace modular. So it's possible to create own stages, where Mail
recipients, following stages and editors can be defined.

We will implement a IRRE interface for the Workspace, where you can
create and connect the stages.

Improve the labels/translations in workspace¶

We also want to improve the labels and descriptions in the workspace
application, to make it easier to understand for the customer.

Easy preview method for Extensions¶

At the moment nearly no extension in the frontend supports preview of ws
records. This is because it is nearly impossible to care about workspace
versions when you search and list records with joins. We found a nice
solution with subselects or views, which makes it very easy. This part
has not main priority.

Kind regards

Sonja