Last week the TYPO3 CMS team gathered in a Code Sprint Essen to work on several important areas that needed to be finished before we could declare a "Feature Freeze" in our development of TYPO3 6.2. As already pre-announced in
this blog entry the decision about postponing or not the release would be settled during these days.
So the important announcement straight away: The release of TYPO3 CMS 6.2 LTS will be postponed, which means the feature freeze date is also postponed. The new planned dates (and we are not wanting to postpone that even further) are:
Feature Freeze (beta1): October 15th, 2013
Release 6.2.0: December 10th, 2013
The decision didn't came lightly but we had seen it coming for some time already. The main reason is that we are aware that 6.2 LTS will be the most important version after 4.5 LTS, released three years ago. The Core Team doesn't want to rush a release just for the sake of it, while there are still some very important loose ends open that deserve to be tackled, and require some more time and resources.
Of course we could always argue that the product is "never ready" but we
set up some goals for this release which we would like to have a chance to be included. If we would to allow many exceptions after feature freeze we would be undermining the bugfixing and cleanup phase which is as important.
We had some lack or resources during the last months due to holiday and several other causes. We are confident that now having more than one month of development power after the holiday season will allow us to get important things finished.
Improvements
The Install Tool refactoring and improvements have been amazing and we already have several very nice new features in place like testing if broken extensions are installed (i.e. if they throw Fatal errors) and deinstalling them, thanks to the work of Christian Kuhn, Susanne Moog and Nicole Cordes. During the Code Sprint Susanne managed to create the first version of the "Distribution Management" in the Extension Manager, which will allow us to provide packages like Introduction or Government as TER extensions.
Nicole finished the work on enabling "saltedpasswords" by default: There will be no more TYPO3 installation storing straight MD5 hashes for Backend Users. Even the Install Tool now uses saltedpasswords!
More in the background but a huge improvement is the addition of a
Functional Testing Framework. This addition will enable us to tackle important fixes in areas like workspaces or language handling in future.
In the UI we have had minor adjustments and are currently working together with the UX team on
several UX issues.
Pending Issues / Priorities
These are the topics that we are trying to focus currently - more or less in order of priority:
File Abstraction Layer (FAL) API and TypoScript API
File Handling Usability
Install Tool, Distribution Support - we need to ship a working Introduction Package
Upgrade Wizard, Smooth Migration
Workspacing (Extbase, FAL, IRRE, ...)
Logging API - still
lots of issues left
Page Module Usability
Composer / Packages Support - a huge
work in progress
Design foundations for backend modules
A current
list of pending issues for 6.2 can be followed in the projects forge wiki. The release team will try to keep this list up-to-date.
Next Code Sprint in October
To have a very focused final spurt we will also organize a feature freeze Code Sprint during the days before the Beta1 release. A
Doodle Survey is currently in place for the TYPO3 Active Contributors to define the exact dates of this sprint.
Every help is appreciated, so please consider joining our effort into making the next TYPO3 release the best release ever. If you don't know where you can help, just contact the Release Manager
Ernesto Baschny (baschny @ Skype) and we will find you some task to work on.