Hey Neos team members and community. According to our bookkeeping we have around 29k€ available in our piggy bank for the rest of the year.
I think the 7.1 Release Management has not yet been invoiced and 7.2 is currently underway - so that should take about 6k€. 7.3 LTS before the end of the year? - another 3k€.
This leaves us with around 20k€ to be spent. @robert I have no insight into our current legal situation regarding trademarks, so please add that too.
As every year it would be a pity to let too much of that go to taxes…
We will collect suggestions until 24th September 2021 and vote on the suggested topics afterwards. Let me know if the suggestion timeframe is too small.
I would love to continue the efforts on the Media UI Rewrite.
Sadly after this years NeosCon not so much happened in terms of help for pushing ahead, even though several projects seem to use it now in production. Due to private stuff and summer time I also didn’t push the topic ahead so much anymore.
We had a smaller release with a several contributions and I did some bug fixing.
Currently I only have some funding left from two customers for stabilising the new asset usage implementation I presented in May.
Therefore my application is still mostly valid except that the numbers don’t reflect this restarting and pausing every 3-4 months and how how this topic now goes on. So with an additional boost of 5.000€ I would see to it to have a relevant feature complete release for Neos 7.3 in December.
More would help me to start working on the “folder” / organisation topic that is now one of the most requested features besides more permission restrictions, which is also a media core topic.
Several further feature requests would also need core changes so they are not really possible before Neos 8.0 and need a group of people to work together.
I might be coming up short on time so this is a “meta topic proposal”, that will require further description:
Documentation and process description of tasks related to managing a release (Release Management) and internal workprocess in a public available domain in the neos.io domain, to make this part of core work in the Neos Project more transparent and available for new members
I would like to suggest an effort on improving the release process automation. I have already started a few things, like rewriting the tool to generate a changelog to a PHP CLI tool and add a slightly modified version that creates release notes for major/minor releases.
Especially the release notes part needs some more love to extract a better prepared base. Also there are still some steps that are scripted in bash, which is working but of course hard to read and moreso change for someone not involved with bash (like me, I’m just googling my way through really).
On top there are some topics like:
the release script&process is flaky in the case that jenkins will not fully run through. Optimally you would be able to just restart the job and it would overwrite an existing (unfinished) release or create a new one as normal. https://github.com/neos/BuildEssentials/issues/52
upmerges should be done automatically when a branch is created so that the composer version adjustments won’t accidentially end up in master. Additionally, maybe automatic upmerges could be done for changelog and/or translations https://github.com/neos/flow-development-distribution/issues/70
I don’t know how much time this will effectively take to get done done, but a budget of maybe 30h (3.000€) dedicated focus work should bring this to a very promising state already. I’ll still continue to work on that front even if the budget wouldn’t be granted/suffice, but I can not dedicate a lot of focus work right now.
I’ve pitched for some projects lately we want to realize with Neos, so I spent quite some thoughts about why I’m convinced Neos is the right choice for the given projects. Some of the projects are currently using TYPO3 and therefore I also had time to weigh both the advantages and disadvantages of TYPO3 and Neos.
For example, the Neos inline editing and workspace features are a very good sell (especially compared to TYPO3).
When I think about what is really missing in Neos for the “average” customer, two things are on top of my mind:
A method to undo changes: Recently, in a customer project, I deleted a page in a dimension shortly before going-live - by accident. The last backup was from the last deployment, so we lost a bit of work. Nothing tragic, but in TYPO3, I would have had it back in no time. I know about the difficulties of an undo feature (and alternative approaches such as soft delete with Doctrine) and I think that’s why the “Undo” feature was always “sold” as a part of the Event Sourced CR. I know that the ES CR is much more than providing the ability to create an Undo feature, but when it comes down to the average customer, this is what they currently miss.
Better Media management: We have customers with > 100 Asset Collections which doesn’t look so nice in the backend. Sebastian’s work clearly shows a way towards a great Media Management and he already mentioned that a “folder” topic is in discussion.
These are basically the things I really miss in Neos. Nearly everything else in a CMS project can be achieved with planned extensibility - which is by the way one of the great strenghts of Neos: You can achieve so much with just core functionality and very little PHP code.
I don’t know how other people see it, but I would suggest to concentrate the budget spending on these projects (apart from trademark, productivity tools for releases etc.).
Of course, besides money, we need the brilliant minds actually coding the stuff we want to badly . Therefore it would be great to also read from the ES CR team what their capacities are and how much funding they could actually “spend” during the rest of 2021.
Depending on capacity, we could also try raising more money from agencies to give this a boost. I’d be willing to discuss this with others interested.
I totally agree. We have the exact same responses from our customers, almost lost a project to another CMS because of the missing functions: “undo” and “history” (know who changed what in the CR).
If the ES CR team has time to invest this year, I would be happy if you could give a large part of the budget to them.
Also personally, can’t wait to find out what other nice feature are possible with the ES CR.
just one note: it might happen, that we still need a bit more budget for trademark issues, I can’t really estimate that right now, since it depends on $things. So, let’s keep that in mind at least and not spend all the money we have
Thanks for the flexibility to vote on the budgets here in Discuss!
So although there are still some unknowns about the legal/trademark costs, I think we can still vote on the proposed budgets as follows, to give the budget owners the certainty to go ahead and plan their work:
. Therefore it would be great to also read from the ES CR team what their capacities are and how much funding they could actually “spend” during the rest of 2021.
