Lightning Talk at FOSDEM Brussels, 02.-03.02.2013

1. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
1
The Development Infrastructure
of the
TYPO3 project
Lizenz: CC BY-SA 3.0
(pictures of other authors excluded)

2. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
What to expect from this talk? 2
✘ Learn to set up a perfect development infrastructure
✘ See the perfect infrastructure of the TYPO3 project
✔ Learn how people in another FLOSS project work
✔ See an infrastructure built from 100% open-source
? Find inspiration for your project
? Get in touch with me/us for collaboration
admin@typo3.org - we’re happy to share!

3. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
Steffen Gebert 3
• TYPO3 CMS Core Team Member
(2010-2012)
• TYPO3 Server Admin Team Member
(since 2011)
• PhD Student in Computer Science
(Communication Networks, since 2011)
• E-Mail: steffen.gebert@typo3.org
Twitter: @StGebert

4. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
Questions! 4
• Happy to answer
your questions!
• Come down here
after the talk!
comments included!
• Slides available
Foto “Question mark”: Yello-Dog
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1279316
http://slideshare.net/stephenking/
nice that you found the slides - have fun ☺

5. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
What’s TYPO3? 5
• TYPO3 CMS
• Started: 1997, first release: 1999
• More than 5M downloads
• PHP-based, GPLv2
• New products
• TYPO3 Flow: PHP framework
• “TYPO3 Flow and the Joy of Development” by Robert Lemke
from yesterday
• TYPO3 Neos
• New CMS based on TYPO3 Flow - alpha state

6. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
Who’s TYPO3? 6
• TYPO3 is community-driven open-source
• no company behind, TYPO3 Association for financial support
• Core teams steering development (99.x% volunteer work)
• CMS with ~25ppl., Flow/Neos with ~12ppl.
Photo: Tobias Liebig

7. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
7
Requirements of an
Open Source Project
Photo by brokenarts:
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/207291

8. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
Requirements 8
• Collaboration & Communication
• Source Code & Versioning
• Quality Assurance & Testing
• Documentation & Translation
Photo by brokenarts:
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/207291
There are couple of temas working on tasks other than development
- Design, Usability, Marketing, Screencast, Event teams
- Teams and committees of the TYPO3 Association (Board, Expert Advisory Board, Budget
Control Committee)

9. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
Using own infrastructure 9
• We’ve been there before Github ☺
• Sourceforge.net initially used for CVS
• Got hacked, often unreliable
• Owning our data (esp. issue tracker)
• Own account management
• Provide central place and connected services for the TYPO3 community
• Nevertheless, open towards great, free hosted services for less critical
things
• Human resources are a problem, of course

10. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
10
Communication and Collaboration
Image by fangol:
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1269811

11. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
Communication in the TYPO3 Project 11
• Mailing lists and news groups used since 2003
• Ten years later (last Monday):
forum.typo3.org

12. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
Forum and Official Communication 12
• Forum
• Based on FUDforum
• Bi-directional sync with news groups
• Easier access to official channels (we hope..)
• Decisions take place in lists
• Transparency towards more people
• Avoid hidden communication
• Avoid surprises (well, we still fail too often)
Image by svilen001:
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1165445

13. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
Forge Platform 13
• Based on Redmine
• Project space for 2400+ projects
• Core projects, Community Extensions, Other teams
• Features Want to contribute?
➪ See who’s responsible
• Membership listing
not the
• Issue tracker
best one ☹
• Wiki, Repo Browser, Roadmap
News, Time Tracking
forge.typo3.org
It’s often a bit chaotic in a big open source community. Being able to find the persons in
charge is important!
Forge is the place where to search.
We know that we’re running a very outdated redmine version. We’re sorry and ashamed.
We’re working on an upgrade.

14. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
14
Source Code and Versioning
Source:
http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

15. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
Source Code Versioning 15
• TYPO3 is using Git since 2010/11
• .. but we use a special flavor of Git
• Unfortunately still lot of extensions restricted to subversion
Yes.. it’s true. The high Subversion usage is our (=admin team) fault.. we still haven’t
launched official git support for community extensions. But it’s near.

16. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
16
Quality Assurance and Testing
Photo by bredmakers:
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1280927

17. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
Motivation for Code Reviews 17
• Bugs do exist
• Ensure code quality through peer-reviews (4 eyes in our case)
• Discussing code improves it
• Reviews before merge
• Learn from each other
• Make development transparent, involves community
• Using Gerrit Code Review as Git server and review tool
Photo by asifthebes:
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/912841
every change has to be reviewed by at least two other persons, one of them being team
member

18. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
Gerrit Code Review 18
review.typo3.org
All code-changes for core projects are peer-reviewed by at least two people (one of them
team member)
(Disclaimer: except trivial changes)

19. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
Gerrit Code Review 19

20. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
Gerrit Code Review 20
• Diff view
review.typo3.org

21. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
More About Gerrit 21
Interested in more Gerrit details?
“Using Gerrit Code Review in an open-source project”
by myself :-)
Here at 15:40

22. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
Continuous Integration and Code Quality 22
• ci.typo3.org runs our Jenkins server
• PHP lint (syntax check)
• PHP CodeSniffer (enforcement of Coding Guide Lines)
• PHP Mess detector
• Automatic down-vote in Gerrit in case of violations
• metrics.typo3.org runs Sonar
• Code Metrics
• For Core and Extensions, 5600+ projects

23. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
TravisCI - More Continuous Integration 23
• TravisCI is
»a hosted continuous integration service for the open source community«
• What it does? It executes tests!
• Fetches your code from Github
• Supported languages: C++, Clojure, Erlang, Go, Groovy, Haskell, Java,
JavaScript (with Node.js), Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Scala
To execute post-merge unit tests, we are replicating our Git repo to Github, from which
Travis fetches it.
In order to let Travis execute them for every patch set, we are currently building a tool to
push and fetch Travis’ results and add them to Gerrit.

24. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
TravisCI 24
• Spins up virtual machines (using Vagrant and Chef)
• Runs your unit tests in different an environments
• Example:
php:
-­‐
5.2
-­‐
5.3
-­‐
5.4 PHP 5.2 PHP 5.3 PHP 5.4
env:
-­‐
DB=mysql
MySQL ✔ ✔ ✔
-­‐
DB=pgsql
PostgreSQL ✔ ✘ ✔

25. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
25
Documentation and Translation
Photo by topfer: Photo by ftibor:
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/969875 http://www.sxc.hu/photo/533821

26. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
Translating TYPO3 26
• Pootle-based
• Core + Extensions can be translated
• Language packages generated, provided for download
translation.typo3.org
Photo by ftibor:
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/533821

27. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
Documentation 27
• Was a raw point for long time
• Used OpenOffice 1.x .sxw files since ages
• Migration to DocBook
• started / planned, but format turned out to be too complicated
• Migration to reStructuredText (reST)
• Started ~2011
• Milestone reached with TYPO3 6.0 (Oct. 2012): docs.typo3.org
• TYPO3 CMS Core documentation converted to reST
Photo by topfer:
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/969875
- During .sxw times, we used a wiki page to write down pending documentation changes,
which sucked
- docbook format is based on xml, pretty heavyweight. Probably because of markdown,
people feel better with plain-text?

28. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
reStructuredText 28
created for
• Plain-text format, similar to markdown
docs.python.org
• Parsed and rendered through sphinx
• Rendering chain at TYPO3
• Managed through TYPO3 Flow app lower barrier
for adoption
• Can import old .sxw files
• You can view sources on docs.typo3.org!
• Changes reviewed through Gerrit
Documentation is parsed and rendered through the tools docutils and sphinx (both created
for docs.python.org).
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html
Intersphinx allows cross-manual referencing
Being able to import old manuals hopefully lowers the barrier to migrate documentation from
sxw to reST

29. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
Solutions at a Glance 29
• Collaboration & Communication
• Mailing lists / NNTP / Forum using FUDforum, Redmine
• Source Code & Versioning
• Git with Gerrit as server and review tool
• Quality Assurance and Testing
• Gerrit, Jenkins with couple PHP tools, TravisCI
• Documentation & Translation
• reStructuredText, sphinx, Pootle
Honestly, we use couple of more tools:
- mailman runs our mailing lists.. what else (ah, we have a sympa server vor TYPO3 Assoc
member lists, but I wouldn’t recommend that software)
- etherpad-lite for meeting notes and collaborative writing: http://notes.typo3.org
- BigBlueButton web conferencing server: http://bigbluebutton.typo3.org
- and we have been using Mantis as bug tracker for years. Mantis (http://bugs.typo3.org) is
now archived and Redmine (http://forge.typo3.org) acts as tracker for *all* TYPO3 projects.
- yes, we are still running a subversion server for some thousand projects
-

30. Brussels, 02. - 03.02.2013
Questions! 30
• Happy to answer
your questions!
• @StGebert on Twitter
• steffen.gebert@typo3.org
comments included!
• Slides available
Foto “Question mark”: Yello-Dog
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1279316
http://slideshare.net/stephenking/

31. inspiring people to share
inspiring people to share