External Import

It's my great pleasure to announce today the release of External Import's new major version. There was a lot of work involved, often complicated by lack of documentation for the tools used (I'm thinking about ExtJS here) and my available time was limited. The work was spread over many months and I'm very happy to have finally completed it.

So what happened:

• all the legacy code was dropped. The BE module contained JS for AJAX calls compatible down to TYPO3 4.1, the automation process still supported Gabriel. All that is gone and the code could be cleaned up quite a bit.
• the BE module was completely rewritten. It's now based on Extbase and mostly relies on ExtJS and ExtDirect for all the logic. It is much more user-friendly in my opinion, and I hope that you will agree ;-) It is also adapted to the current TYPO3 skin.
• compatibility is ensured up to TYPO3 4.7 (but minimum version required is 4.5).
• on top of that are a number of new features:
  • importing date and time information is easier, with the system taking time zones into account automatically
  • imported data can now reference itself, including when importing into the "pages" table
  • cache clearing can be called after a import run
  • handling of XML data supports namespaces

The ground is ready for more features, but I'll take a rest first ;-)