Core dev Q&A

[Cam Findlay]

Hey all, 

Something I have been tasked to do is get more talk about core and it's inner workings, direction and new feature discussion going on. A couple of things I'd like to trial out this month will be:

1. A core dev google hangout session (core devs talking about some of the items coming through uservoice, discussion of ideas, approaches, considerations with what is already under the hood in SilverStripe core).

2. A fortnightly Q&A blog post (initially from Hamish Friedlander and happy to look at getting other core devs to do the same).

What I'd like to get from you guys is mostly around item 2.

Post your difficult questions here, particularly relating to anything you wanted to know about what is going on under the hood in core.

 We'll pick a few good questions for Hamish to pick his brain and help share more knowledge around SilverStripe core.

Thanks :)

[g4b0]

Hi, I'd like to know which is the future for versioning. I'm currently working on a project that need to version pages with their attachments and dataobjects. Since this project started with S.S. 3.0.dev-master (now it's a 3.1.5) it has it's own custom versioning and custom workflow, and I'm scared that next upgrades will break everything :)

my 2 cent
g4b0

[schippie]

Their are three areas i would really like to get more information on:

• What are the steps that are currently being taken to improve the documentation?
  
• Are their any improvements on the way for improving the way filters on datalist work. See: http://www.silverstripe.org/community/forums/data-model-questions/show/72438#post370343#post370343
• Are their any plans to improve the model admin (for the CMS) to include the functionality to easily create Trees in the Admin panel. 

[Roman]

I'd be interested in a rundown of what exactly happens during a request to a SilverStripe Page.
What is happening during the bootstrap, which subsystems get called at what point in time and where do we developers have hooks to tie in custom functionality?

I think this would also make an excellent part of the documentation :)

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[Marcus Dalgren]

+1 on Romans request!
This is a part of the system we've been struggling to customize. We have a single page application where the frontend layer has the final say but right now SilverStripe takes over the request and I haven't been able to stop it.
Before you could have a catchall method in the controller but this functionality doesn't seem to exist anymore. Gaining a better understanding of the request process and where to hook in in order to affect it in different ways would be invaluable.
Maybe some examples about how you could change request behavior with custom controllers if that's possible?

[Cam Findlay]

Thanks for that guys, some excellent questions :)

I'll actually get UncleCheese to respond to the documentation stuff, Willr and himself will be getting on to a bit of that work in the near future.

Plus there was a big conversation about it here on the dev list with some progress too.

Keep the questions coming.

[James Turner]

I've got a few questions (probably will have more later):

1. What is the 'admin' folder in Silverstripe Framework? There seems to be a lot of CMS-like code in it (LeftAndMain, ModelAdmin etc). I'm just generally curious why it exists in Framework and what dependencies it has.

2. Extensions! Particularly the use of 'Object->extend()'. It seems pretty powerful but only when the function you want to extend actually implements it. Obviously many functions in Framework don't and without trying to do a pull request to add that type of call in every function. Was this a particular design choice when building the core?

3. What is Silverstripe's policy on supporting PHP versions (if there is one at all)? Is this more when we eventually hit PHP 5.7 or PHP 6, Silverstripe will no longer worry about PHP 5.3 etc?

4. (If many different developers do the Q/A blog), what is the one feature you would add or remove from the core framework?

[Uncle Cheese]

Hey, guys,

I'll reiterate what Cam said -- these are great questions, and I'm keen to hear answers to them, as well. Any questions that don't make it into this round, we'll keep around for future hangouts. We also plan to have a podcast that could address questions directly from the community. So keep them coming!

On the documentation front: Will Rossiter has been getting his hands dirty with a rewrite of the SS docs section, improving not only the content, but also the look-and-feel. We're looking to release it within the next month, but before we do that, we need your feedback, so please check it out and let us know how it suits you. 

http://ssdrw.herokuapp.com/

Needless to say, this doesn't address the deficit in the volume of documentation, but our hope is that you can see that this is a platform that will be much more conducive to growing more and higher quality written documentation.

[James Turner]

Had a quick look over the new documentation setup. Will take a little while getting use to it but it does look good. Where should we go to leave feedback for it?

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[Uncle Cheese]

Yeah, good point. I'll light up a new thread, so we can let this one live on as the Q&A list.

On Tuesday, 14 October 2014 16:26:12 UTC+13, Cam Findlay wrote:

[Nicolaas Thiemen Francken - Sunny Side Up]

Hi

A lot of super devs are using all sorts of caching tricks and tools - some of which are part of the core (e.g. ZEND cache). It would be good to get some idea on what is recommended in what situation.  

Nicolaas

[Conrad Dobbs]

I'd be interested in where the current performance bottlenecks are in core. It's something I'd like to look into if I ever get time. Short of doing full page caching (highly recommend dynamic cache module), it's hard to get decent performance under load.

[Will Rossiter]

@Nicolaas, Simon wrote a good post on that side of things at http://www.silverstripe.org/blog/improving-silverstripe-performance/. It’s could be worth expanding on each of those points.

@James Turner, I’ll get some feedback system in when it gets migrated to beta.docs.silverstripe.org but until then the best place to post feedback is the Trello board.

I'd be interested in a rundown of what exactly happens during a request to a SilverStripe Page.

This is defiantly more of an issue for the current documentation. I’ve included a whole Guide in the rewrite for this under “Execution Pipeline”. I haven’t started work on writing this yet (just put what we had from the current docs on the topic). You can subscribe to https://trello.com/c/V6AfTYOV to be notified once there is a draft of this documentation done.

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[colymba]

Here are a few thing from the top of my head...

• How separate/independent the Framework and CMS really are? I always find myself finding features/pieces of code that should really be in one or the other.... 
  
• How are Github issues pull requests reviewed? What can we do to speed things up and help...
  
• What are the new Features, Pull Request and Issues being reviewed by the Core Team and the status...
  
• Roadmap update...

EmberJS has those Core Team Meeting Minutes, which are quite nice.. http://emberjs.com/blog/2014/09/13/core-team-meeting-minutes-2014-09-12.html

[Cam Findlay]

yeah the idea of minutes is good. We'll probably start with having recordings of the hangouts.

[mon...@gmail.com]

SilverStripe docs page is mostly automatically generated form PHP comments included in the SS code. This causes the examples to be very terse. Are there any plans on making the docs section more useful and practical by opening it to user contribution, moderated by SS?

Artur

[Uncle Cheese]

I think you're thinking of the API docs, not the developer docs. The API docs are auto generated from the source code comments, and that's typical for most libraries.

On Tuesday, 14 October 2014 16:26:12 UTC+13, Cam Findlay wrote:

[Cam Findlay]

Apologies guys, have dropped the ball on this one.

 I'll chase up Mr. Friedlander and see if we can get this under way. 

The core commiters did however have an initial google hangout session to work out how to best run future public open sessions which is a good start.

We'll run one of these open sessions either later this year or early next (given this is the season where everyone wants work done before Xmas, I have a felling it will be the later).

Cheers,

Cam

 

On Tuesday, 14 October 2014 16:26:12 UTC+13, Cam Findlay wrote: