my 2 cents

On Friday I attended the Metaways Christmas-Party. By Chance I sat next to our chef Typo3 developer. By talking about the current situations in our both projects, we found a lot of similarities.

• Both projects came a long road, are many years in production state, and have collected a huge userbase on this way.
• Both projects started from zero and reached their current reputation with an ongoing evolution of the software.
• Both projects consists of lots of tight bound procedural php4 code which became hard to understand and maintain over the years.
• Both projects make only trivial usage of their DBMS features.
• Both projects are quite limited in their userinterfaces due to the usage of typoscript on one side and etemplates on the other side.
• In Both projects, developers felt the need to start a rewrite from scratch to face those problems with using latest techniques while still having a stable product.

Unfortunately the similarities end here. In eGroupWare this caused an ugly power struggle. In Typo3 the project leader (Kasper) solved the situation in a remarkable way.

Watch this two podcasts yourself [1,2]. Its content was told to me on Friday evening. Fortunately we changed our topic as it made me quite sad that I’m obviously not part of the winning community.