The forge is with us

By: François

Back in February the birth of forge.typo3.org was announced. A lot of exciting details were then presented at T3DD08. Let me convince you how great a tool it is.

At first I wasn't really impressed with forge.typo3.org. I felt more more like "Boy, yet another TYPO3 community web site!" The presentation of this new platform at T3DD08 (held by Sebastian Kurfürst) radically changed my point of view.

The main aim of forge.typo3.org is to reduce the number of web sites a TYPO3 developer needs to keep up with if he wants to be informed properly. Take extensions for example. They are published on typo3.org. Their code is either unavailable or hosted on typo3xdev, which provides very few services besides the Subversion repository. They may use bugs.typo3.org for tracking issues, but who knows exactly how to get his extension listed there anyway?

Enter forge.typo3.org. Ta-dah! First of all it is dead easy to register with Forge: it uses your typo3.org account. So if you already have one, there's simply nothing more to do. Can it get any easier? Then as soon as you are logged in, you can register a project. This will be either an extension for TYPO3 v4 or a package for TYPO3 v5. This registration process is also very simple: enter a title and a description and you're done. There are more options but it's not necessary to set them right away.

After this simple step you already benefit from the following: a dedicated Subversion repository with you own rights management, a bug tracker, a news system complete with RSS feed, a wiki, an internal document repository, an activity dashboard (with RSS feed), a timesheet tool, calendar and Gantt chart views based on the issues entered in the bug tracker and built-in statistics for the SVN repository. Ain't that sweet?

I started toying with Forge right after Sebastian's talk at T3DD08. I created a project for the donations extension and could right away add Benni as a project member, without having to bother any administrator. Since then I have added many more extensions to Forge and I am immensely pleased with its use. I was able to manage permissions as I wanted, set up dedicated wikis and issue news as necessary. Soon typo3xdev will move over to Forge and I can't wait to have all my stuff there.

May the Forge be with you (too)!

---