When I joined the TYPO3 Community back in 2004, I remember everything felt very un-personal - people communicated over mailing lists, there were some names I read again and again on the mailing lists, but I could not put faces to them. This all changed after my first T3BOARD, and suddenly it was even more fun to work with TYPO3, fix some bugs or implement some new feature.
The quintessence for me is that it is really important for new developers to connect names to faces, as everything feels a lot more personal then!
Implementing user images was however not our first priority, but it soon turned out that we had still some time left, and wanted to include this cool new feature in forge.
Uploading the user picture on forge did not seem like a great idea, as the user profile resides on typo3.org. That's why Martin created a custom extension for typo3.org where you can upload your user image. If you did not do so already, log in on typo3.org, and you upload your photo in "Your account -> User Photo"! It then automatically shows up in the typo3.org page header.
On your next login to forge.typo3.org, the image hash is synchronized and your image now shows up at various places on forge!
Currently, we show a big version of the image at the Forge User Profile site, and small versions on the project member lists.
I think these little images, although only a small addition, add a lot to the "human feeling" of the platform.
What do you think? I am really eager to hear your opinion.
If you have ideas how to make forge better, please send me an email to sebastian(at)typo3.org!
The next posting of this series will be about single-signon on forge.typo3.org and svn.typo3.org
Cheers,
Sebastian