The development of TYPO3 CMS is mainly done by volunteers in their free time. This often means that coordinating and focussing on bigger topics can be a challenge as everyone has different work preferences, times and availability.

To mitigate some of this—and frankly because we enjoy it—we are using focus code sprints to allow working on a specific topic in a smaller group sitting in one place. One such code sprint has just taken place in Rosenheim—from November 7th to November 11th—focusing on Link Handling, Site Handling and Routing.

What Does a Code Sprint Look Like?

Eight developers met at in2code’s home base to fix bugs and add new features related to routing and site handling in TYPO3. We started each day by having breakfast at eight and started coding at nine at the latest—in the evenings we usually left between 11pm and 1am to make the most out of the time we had together. On Wednesday evening, we were invited to a barbecue to get our heads out of the code for a few hours.

In addition to the concrete issues that were worked on, we also had the opportunity to talk to the people at in2code and swap notes on client requirements, marketing and UX for TYPO3.

Focus to Achieve Success

During the code sprint, 60 patches were merged to the TYPO3 core, both by the sprint participants as well as the remote core contributors. Out of the 60, 9 were completely new features and 23 were bug fixes. Additionally, over a hundred forge issues were updated.

Some of the features built during the week were useful for PHP developers or provide the base for future improvements (for example the PHP settings API). Others are directly visible, like the file mounts comparison view. See below for a complete list of implemented new features during the sprint.