Maintenance of my extensions

TYPO3 Association Budget 2022
#1

Application by
Georg Ringer

What is your idea about?
I maintain several extensions, especially news + tt_address which are used very often and even if not used in projects directly often are used as kind of living documentation + best practice.
Maintenance of such extensions and keeping support to latest TYPO3 versions takes a lot of time

What is the potential impact of your idea?
Having extensions with less bugs and ready for next major TYPO3 versions makes it easier for agencies and integrators to update and use latest features.

Who can / should implement your idea?
I will take care myself

Approximate Funds needed
€10,000 - €25,000

8 Likes
#2

Hello Georg,

thank you for your application. The goal of the TYPO3 Association is to reduce the amount of money spend on worktime for code. Instead the money should be used to enable people to be part of teams or to enlarge the community. Can you please explain why -in your special case- money for code should be spend?

In our call for applications we asked for specific ideas to grow the membership of the TYPO3 Association. Can you please explain how you application can help to grow the number of members?

#3

All important extensions I develop are fully public on GitHub. Having reliable extensions and updates is a lot of work and just accepting every pull request doesn’t really work out. I am glad for every support but most work is still done by me. I bet this is the same for many other extensions.

I plan to improve the tests and raise the code quality to be able to trust pull requests more but apart of that I don’t have any idea how I can grow the number of maintainers. Maybe the TYPO3 Association or someone else got more ideas?

Personally I don’t like the development behind paywalls which is done by extensions like solr or powermail because even if you pay there is still no guarantee or clear information when a compatible release is done which makes it hard for the planning of updates, … Furthermore 99,5% of the community won’t pay (the TYPO3 assocication can certainly improve that) and of course also can’t update to latest core versions. Both, solr and powermail, released new versions in the last days and both contain dozens of hours spent by me (paid by the agency I work at) to be compatible with TYPO3 11 and PHP 8.

Personally I don’t like the development behind paywalls but I don’t see any other options in the long run to have both: Good and early support of latest TYPO3 versions and happy extension maintainers!

7 Likes
#4

Georgs extensions are very important for the widespread usage of TYPO3. I know hardly a customer project that doesn’t use at least one of them.

Usage of TYPO3 in customer projects is the main incentive for agencies to join the TYPO3 association. The more projects an agency does in TYPO3 the more likely it is to become a member or upgrade its membership.

If Georgs extensions should not be maintained anymore TYPO3 would be less useful for customer projects. Therefore less agencies would feel the incentive to become an association member.

4 Likes
#5

Extensions by Georg belong without any doubts to the most important ones for TYPO3.

In my opinion the TYPO3 Association should define a pool of extensions that improve the user experience significantly, like the extension news and support them regularly.
Certainly this doesn’t mean that each of those pool-extensions have to be used all together in a project but that the download numbers reflect a high usage and benefit for users and customers.

Beside that I see that paywalls reduce usage of extensions like powermail and gridelements and open budgets to migrate to other solutions. So Georg’s approach to work without paywall seems being the right one.

6 Likes
#6

My 2 cents: I think sponsoring key extensions to be available BEFORE an LTS release is done such as news and tt_address is super important and part of the adoption of newer versions, as Georg already pointed out. His previous work in such extensions also helped to find bugs in TYPO3 Core before the LTS came out. I do believe this strategy is much more valuable than other solutions where we don’t have a compatible extension 6 (!) months after an LTS release, that is 14 months after 11.0 came out. News and tt_address are role models to show that extensions and the ecosystem are just as important as the Core product.

11 Likes
#7

I don’t think I have the perfect answer, but here’s my thoughts:

I agree some extensions are central to the project and their quality and maintenance reflects back on the project. Georg is probably the top developer of that category of extensions.

How to support those extensions is an important question. Leaving such extensions up to annual budget “competitions” isn’t good, but it’s currently the only way to get money through the project.

I have been playing with an idea I call the “Plus Membership”, where Association members opt to double(?) their membership fee. 15%(?) of the extra money would go to core development and 85%(?) goes to support external projects that are vital or central to TYPO3. Such projects could be Georg’s News extension, but also Symfony or XDebug.

In any case, I think it’s important that we (i.e. the TYPO3 project and community) define what external projects are central to TYPO3’s long-term survival and then take the steps to support those projects long-term too.

9 Likes
#8

I support Georg’s approach and love these extensions. His extensions are fully open source and support for their development comes from a mix of direct sponsors and this community support (and presumably consulting/employers, as well).

Making them compatible for the next LTS in time is vital. Work delivered on a schedule requires funding.

Georg’s publishing model helps TYPO3 adoption in general. It’s up to the copyright holders, but I wish all such “essential” extensions followed Georg’s approach. When people consider adopting TYPO3 and see that other important components are not readily available, they may be hesitant.

Submitting an annual request to the community seems OK. It is like an incumbent official up for reelection. The extension author requesting community support should be able to say each year how much their extension is used and pledge to support and improve it for another year.

We should all support this development rather than having some special membership tier. Maybe some portion should be community-voted and some portion should come directly from the T3A budget (like a match).

Keep up the great work, Georg!

2 Likes
#9

I agree with all spokesmen here and want to add, that in perspective, we should improve the financial contributions of companies for this specific topic. As the benefit is quite obvious for companies, compared to e.g. documentation, marketing, etc., we should think about how to attract companies to paying a fair amount for the ongoing work. I end up again and again with TYPO3 Karma: Each paying member or contributor should have a profile page at typo3.org which lists any kind of statistics of his contributions. And this profile page is something companies can do marketing with, like e.g. when hiring developers and showing their engagement for open source. Taking up “paying a fair amount”: It should be of that kind, that a company does not get the feeling to pay for all the other companies - which could be done by collecting companies which have interest in financial contribution in the first step and then dividing the total amount of contribution by all companies collected.

2 Likes
#10

Im totally with Georg.

There are certain extensions like news, tt_address which are essential for my projects.
A later update to current Typo3 releases is critical.

What about voting for a certain number of extensions which are then considered as “essential” and are sponsored to be ready with Typo3 updates.

#11

I would differ these 2:

Powermail is a extension that i would rank equal to tt_address and news, though it replaces and not adds core functionality. But a super extension that should be

Gridelements though (which is still not Typo3 11.5-ready!) is an extension whose functionality should be added to the core, because a modern websites is based on a grid layout system, and perfectly integrates with the backend layout system.
I have offered to sponsor the integration.

All in all, there are maybe a dozen really critical extensions that should be ready when a LTS come out and therefore be sponsored.

#12

Just a quick poll: Who would be in for a Sponsoring/Plus-Membership/Payed Service for the development of the important extensions?

2 Likes
#13

In principle, I would be in favor of doubling the basic fee to about 15 EUR per year. But especially for the ongoing maintenance of the top extensions, I would rather invest money in an attractive auction system that makes companies pay for the updates of their most used extensions so that they are up to date in time with the next major TYPO3 release.

#14

Likely the decision about powermail would be easy.

Concerning gridelements, which I often used longer time ago btw., the extension has competition by many solutions like mask, container, templaVoilá plus, and some more extensions.
Concerning sponsoring it’s likely not required that an extension is the only one solving a problem, but if many solutions exist it’s raising the question if the solution is the best one or at least without serious flaws. Those flaws never have to be in the solution itself but can be in the code base too, and that’s the issue I see in gridelements. The TYPO3 core has still some issues with multi-language sites. Moving gridelements to the core will likely make those language problems worse.

Anyway, that’s going far beyond the application and sponsoring topic, so I propose to leave it like that about distinct extensions beside news at this place.

#15

Extensions seeking this kind of community support should propose their budget for discussion and voting, just as Georg has done here.

2 Likes
#16

I would like to share the feedback I got. I am currently discussing with some friends what this means and how I will continue with my open source envolvment.

together with the board we have reviewed your idea for “Maintenance of my extensions (Georg Ringer)”. Thank you for handing in this idea(s) and thank you for your patience.

During the last years the TYPO3 Association used the reserve (created by the entrance fee for the members) for creating a higher yearly budget than the actual income by the membership fees. The strategy of this and the next years is, that the yearly costs of the TYPO3 Association should be covered by the income (which are the memberships) and to leave the rest of the reserve untouched.

Although the costs of the development of TYPO3 are covered by the income of the TYPO3 GmbH, this leads to a smaller budget compared to the last years.

The goal for the TYPO3 Association for this year is to finance ideas which will increase the numbers of members of the TYPO3 Association. Although your idea is interesting for the TYPO3 Project itself, we did not see a direct impact for fostering the memberships of the TYPO3 Association. The board has decided to not accept your proposal.

But: This years budget has still room for some ideas to be financed. We encourage you to hand in a new proposal, the board will grant some budgets during this year as there are more funds available as expected.

We have learned a lot during this year’s budget process and will continue to improve. Expect that the process for 2023 will start much earlier.