TYPO3 Core Budget 2012

By: Ernesto Baschny

To provide a more transparent view for the public on how the T3A finances parts of the TYPO3 Core work, we would like to present to the public how we plan to spend the allocated money during 2012.

Photograph: frank13, Source: Photocase

Every year a certain amount of money is allocated by the TYPO3 Association to the TYPO3v4 and FLOW3/Phoenix Core Development. I am the responsible for the v4 part of the budget starting 2012 (Ingmar Schlecht did it before). Karsten Dambekalns is responsible for the FLOW3/Phoenix part of the budget.

To provide a more transparent view for the public how the T3A sponsors our work and by which amounts, we would like to present to the public how we plan to spend the money in 2012.

Notice that the hourly rate payed by the T3A is now €55 (was €50 before) and the daily rate was raised to €330 (was €300).

TYPO3 v4 Core Budget

=> TYPO3v4 Budget 2012: €90.000 (roughly)

The budget was split up for the application in the following categories:

• Travel Expenses: €20.000
• Release Management: €6.800
• Core Team Lead: €39.600
• Co-Core Team Lead: €15.840

The "rest" (€7.500) is available for our famous "Important Development Pot", which we can decide to use it for stuff that we "need" but nobody is willing to do except for money.

Other than that, we've raised the Release Management gratification from €500 (until 4.7) to €600 (4.8 and later) per month.

More details about the money allocation can be read in this spreadsheet.

TYPO3 v4 and FLOW3/Phoenix Joint Budget

We have less Important Development Pot Budget because the T3A decided to allocate a slice of it to a "Joint v4 / Phoenix Budget", managed jointly by Karsten and myself.

=> Joint TYPO3 v4/v5 Budget 2012: €36.000

We discussed last week in our R&D meeting about the potential use of this budget, and came up with some points worth considering:

• Extbase related "groundwork" (make it stable, make it bug-free, make it reliable, make it *fast*), which can be considered important to avoid frustrations in the path to FLOW3,
• forward porting fixes done to Extbase/v4 fixes into FLOW3/Phoenix, if relevant,
• backwards porting FLOW3/Phoenix fixes, APIs and features to Extbase/v4, as far as is strategically makes sense,
• part of the work on the "new TER" which should be a common basis for FLOW3 Packages *and* TYPO3v4 Extensions. The "new TER" has it's own Budget allocated (Sebastian, Fabien), so this should only cover work necessary to make it a shared resource between the two "worlds,
• Content Migration Wizard (Export v4 Content to import it into Phoenix). Has been kick started before (GSoC), and if we find the man-power, it could be finished.

Potentially other aspects. Feel free to contact me or Karsten, if you think you (or your team) have some work you want to do which could be covered by this budget.

FLOW3/Phoenix Budget

The FLOW3/Phoenix Team budget is (again) managed by Karsten Dambekalns.

=> FLOW3/Phoenix Budget 2012: €197.600

The budget is comparable to last year's budget and covers

• the planned (paid) work of a number of core team members,
• travel expenses for code sprints and meetings

The budget application we handed in is available to download (PDF). Although it does not reflect the exact numbers (the budget was capped and the application did use the hourly rate of 2011) the time planning as well as the feature set mentioned are correct.

A look back at the use of the 2011 budget is also available.

=> Phoenix UX Budget 2012: €24.000

This is a new budget, reserved for UX / UI work. The most pressing blocker for TYPO3 Phoenix right now is the lack of staff on the UX/UI front. We are currently looking into possible solutions and if it makes sense, the money will be invested into staff and travel expenses.

Extbase Budget

The Extbase Team also got allocated it's own budget, managed by Felix Oertel.

=> Extbase Budget 2012: €9.500

According to Felix, it will basically be used to hold three code sprints: March for "finalizing 4.7", before the T3DD12 to "kick-start 4.8" and if possible another one before the 4.8 release. He noted that the budget will probably not be enough for the three sprints. While the extbase team tries to cover the additional costs by sponsoring,  we might consider using parts of the Joint Budget to help out on that important front.

Budget Usage

In case you have some work that you think fits in one of the mentioned categories and you want it to be a payed job, please do not start working on it until you contact one of the corresponding budget managers, explaining your plan and the estimated amount of money to be spend (travel costs, working hours) so that the budget managers can approve (or deny with a reason) your request.