The year 2018 is ending soon and most of us will take a break and celebrate Christmas and the new year 2019. We hope you will have and have a nice and relaxing time!
For us, this is also a chance to look back and to think about the next year and the future of Apache Solr for TYPO3.
2019 will also be special in some ways since we will celebrate the 10th birthday of our Apache Solr integration for TYPO3.
The year 2018 was an exciting year for TYPO3, Apache Solr for TYPO3 and for me as well :-) In the following paragraphs I want to summarize some highlights of our releases in the last year.
The focus of the release was the improvement of the user experience in the TYPO3 backend and the search frontend. With 8.0.x we provided
Besides the usability features a lot of other features (e.g. classification, Apache Solr Phrase support, ...) have been shipped with that release.
With the release of EXT:solr 8.1.0 we shipped the API preparations for new addon's that are accessible for our partners.
The addon solrdebugtools allows you the visually analyze, why a search result has a certain score and is on its current position of the search result list.
With solrconsole you have the possibility to automate tasks for EXT:solr on the command line. This can help you during deployments of maintenance task of your search index.
Our goal was to release EXT:solr 9.0.0 at the and of the 3 quarter, before the release of TYPO3 9. By the end of Q3 the following tasks have been completed:
Unfortunately, we needed to reduce the amount of work that we can put into the development of EXT:solr at the end of Q3.
This has several reasons:
This has several consequences:
As before, we always tried to be close to the development of the TYPO3 core and do the things as early as possible. Therefore the following parts are done:
but as mentions before some things are not done:
Just to get me right: This is not the fault of the TYPO3 core or somebody else. I highly appreciate the work and changes there, because we all need them! We should keep the pace and I like to thank everybody who has worked on the TYPO3 LTS release.
So what does this mean for the future and when will I be able to use EXT:solr with TYPO3 9 LTS
As mentioned before EXT:solr 9 will not fully be ready for TYPO3 9 LTS. Nevertheless, we want to release the current state for everyone who is using TYPO3 8 LTS or wants to test EXT:solr 9 with TYPO3 9 LTS. We also know that some of you already use the current master state with TYPO3 9 LTS and this works for their use case.
By the mid of february we want to release EXT:solr 9 with the above mentioned limitations. Beside that we will release the following addons close to that:
These releases will also provide some other new features:
After the release of EXT:solr 9.0.0 we want to focus on the integration into TYPO3 9. To reduce the effort on that, we will drop the Support of TYPO3 8 LTS in the release after EXT:solr 9.0.0. Our goal is then:
So this will be our goal for the second quarter of 2019.
By now we do not have a strict roadmap, but several ideas:
In 2019 we also want to provide the add-on's with private packagist that you are able to install them with composer. We will publish a pricing model for that in 2019.
Besides these topics we also want to know, what are your ideas and requirements for EXT:solr and which features do you want to see?
Please take the time and throw in your ideas and vote on the ideas. This helps us to propose a roadmap and set the priorities that fit the most user needs:
http://www.tricider.com/brainstorming/2vvCvqAblcF
The things that we achieve in the last year are only possible with the support of several people and we want to use this chance to say thank you:
All of the work is only possible with your support. You can support our project by:
Support us in 2019 by becoming an EB partner:
http://www.typo3-solr.com/en/contact/
or call:
+49 (0)69 - 2475218 0