TYPO3 Initiative Week—Insider Report

From the first get together with a barbecue (main task: know everyones name) and a quick planning the next morning the participants were productive and working on their respective topics. 

But then—the shock: The internet was down. For the whole hotel. A whole day. And night. What to do? Well, to be honest—maybe the internet being down should be a new team building strategy: it resulted in more communication and social interactions and very creative solutions, indeed. 

Kay Strobach turned his phone into an internet hotspot for everyone (in the one corner where the phone actually had a connection). Petra Hasenau quickly organized alternative working rooms at the TU Clausthal (Shout-out to the TU for the quick help!) and the participants gathered in the hotel bar for extended socializing.

The next morning, the technician was welcomed by an eagerly waiting group—there is only so much socializing we could afford with our task list—but he exceeded expectations: he found and fixed the problem quickly and the hard work continued. (See photos for a detail view of the problem and the solution.)

Now that everything was working as planned, the initiatives started to churn out results, see the following sections for results per team:

The TYPO3 Accessibility Initiative just recently restarted their work on improving accessibility awareness into the TYPO3 universe. They already started regular calls for coordination and questions and answers everyone can join (see Slack channel #cig-accessibility). 

During the Initiative Week the team worked on making the TYPO3 page tree accessible, reimplemented the highlighting for the active module menu and made the alternative text field in the backend more prominent, so editors will have more incentive to use it. In addition to the concrete tasks that were done, a lot of communication with the other initiatives happened as accessibility is something every other initiative needs to incorporate.

The first release of the dashboard extension happened at #t3con. Since then, the initiative collected feedback and wishes which were built during the Initiative Week. For example, we now have the possibility to define presets (predefined dashboards), add new dashboards, groups and widgets. 

Additionally, a lot of work has been done on the architectural base: Configuration and code was reworked, functional tests covering 100% of the code have been added. A documentation was also written and published. 

Stay tuned for the next level dashboard release coming soon.

The Documentation Team had a very successful week, without any prompting a lot of people took the week as a chance to work and collaborate on documentation resulting in lots of changes all around. For example, participants write new documentation for TYPO3s new dependency injection, SEO and the dashboard extension. 

The documentation theme was updated, documentation was restructured to be easily accessible and the next steps for documentation search were mapped out. Old services like api.typo3.org were updated and launched. Enjoy our new and improved documentation and check back on docs.typo3.org regularly for the latest news.

All in all it was a successful event with lots of new goodies for TYPO3 as well as improved communication between the initiatives, strengthening the connections of our community.