Community backed?

[Stig Nørgaard Færch]

Hi David

I couldn’t find you on Slack and couldn’t find your e-mail , so I write here instead.

Seems like a really great library, which I think really could speed up the development process.

Unfortunately I see one major obstacle for us using it. Heavily relying on something which is not widely backed by the community seems dangerous to us. Not in the short run, but a couple of years ahead when a site needs upgrading - you can have massive problems if what you based your website on, is no longer maintained. I know you could say that you are here to stay, but that is light assurance to build upon.

So my suggestion would be - see if you could find wide community backing and then also I would love to see documentation in english

Just my two cents.

Best regards,

Stig

[David Bascom]

Well, the first question is:
Want to become part of the community?

Your are totally right.
Let’s think back to all the extensions and projects where we were so absolutely sure: This is the going to be future… and then they were dropped. Remember templavoila? formhandler? Doesn’t it feel “strange” how long it takes FLUX to get their extension(s) updated for the current LTS?

Let’s have a look at the motivation for nnhelpers: Three design/web agencies here were pretty frustrated about having to update dozens of extension with every release of TYPO3. And frustrated of every individual programmers in the team searching the web over and over again for the same problems – and writing own solutions.

(Yes, sure: Things have gotten more relaxed starting with version 9 LTS. But the time the first lines of code for nnhelpers were written, we were talking about TYPO3 version 4.7. From 4.7 to 6 was ugly. From 6 to 8 was horrible.)

In the everyday usage of nnhelpers and developing new extension we are talking about maybe 10 – 15 methods from nnhelpers that we call. These methods might vary from project to project. But these methods save us many hours of time. During development and when doing updates. And when explaining to other members in the team, what we are doing.

Let’s imagine the “worst case”: The three agencies head on to WordPress. TYPO3 is dead for them. No updates for nnhelpers anymore. And nobody out there interested in keeping the extension alive. What would the worst case be for somebody who relied on nnhelpers? He would have to port the 10 – 15 methods in to his own extension and update them. But he would still be doing this centralized – and could easily adopt the methods in all of the extensions he based on nnhelpers.

nnhelpers is not really very complex. The methods are methods you can copy & paste wherever you like. Or you can be inspired by them for your own methods. Have fun, save time.

And then we have had feedback from users who say: “Great extension. No real reason for me to use it… except \nn\t3::debug() – don’t want to live without it anymore. Thanks for that!”.

Here is my contact in case you have any other thoughts. And it would be really great, if you could become “part of the community” :)

Oh, right one more thing: Documentation in English?
https://labor.99grad.de/typo3-docs/nnhelpers/en/
Aaah, ok – yeah. Translated by Deep-L. Pretty shitty. And you are right: The documentation in the source-code is in German. This needs to be changed sooner or later. But as most of the users read the (auto-translated) docs in the backend-module, we kind of “deprioritize” this.

David Bascom
[phone]
[e-mail]

[Stig Nørgaard Færch]

Hi David

Thanks for your answer. We will talk about it, on an upcoming meeting, and then make a decision. Why don’t you do more to make the extension known among other TYPO3 devs? Then you could get more support to maintain it.

Best regards,
Stig