Official Documentation

The Documentation Team has been hard at work updating the documentation for the recently released 4.6 version of TYPO3. The most important core references are now up to date:

• the TSconfig was the first manual to be updated, thanks to Christopher Stelmaszyk.
• the TCA reference followed. As a reminder actually this reference used to be included in the Core APIs manual. One reason for extracting it was to be able to update it separately and thus faster. This work was done by François Suter.
• the TSref was released today. It is now up to date for TYPO3 4.6. This new version also contains the missing reference about the new MEDIA objects introduced in TYPO3 4.5. Credits go to Martin Holtz and Christopher Stelmaszyk.

The Installation Guide and the Getting Started tutorial are not yet up to date. We welcome help on this topic.

Christopher has also focused his work on a new templating tutorial. It is not yet ready for publication, but we have a first draft of a successor to the famous, but outdated Modern Template Building (MTB) tutorial. Follow ups to this new tutorial will cover areas from the MTB2+3 and also the Future Template Building. We are very much looking forward to delivering this overhaul. If you are interested in reviewing this manual, please get in touch with the Documentation Team (documentation@typo3.org).

Another new manual will appear next week, but we'll keep that as a surprise for now. We want it to come out with bang ;-)

We hope you have appreciated all these recent updates. We are conscious that many other manuals are lagging behind, but we are still delivering updates much faster than before and this is a big improvement. We are also concentrating part of our efforts on migrating the official documentation to reStructured Text and we would rather complete this migration faster than spend too much effort updating soon-to-be-abandoned OpenOffice files. Stay tuned!

In the last days we have updated the documentation template, in which you can put the documentation of your extension. The template now uses the same design, which you also know from TSref or TSconfig. This provides your users with an even better experience.

Due to popular demand we also included the official font files in the extension. With them you can produce the right look 1:1.

The template is available in TER under the extension key 'doc_template'.

Grab your copy now!

The TSconfig reference (doc_core_tsconfig) just got an update. The manual was upgraded to the new documentation template and some bugs were fixed. There were actually no new TSconfig properties in TYPO3 4.4. This update is mostly paving the way for the 4.5 version. This is also why we decided not to update the screenshots this time around.

This update was mostly the work of Christopher Stelmaszyk who recently joined in helping care for the official documentation.

Long time, no news. We have lost a bit of momentum in the last few months. Although far more people than ever are participating to documentation, I'm still the only one caring for references such as TSref, TSconfig and Core API. This has led to important delays in updating these core docs for TYPO3 4.4. I deeply regret this situation, but it can't be helped for now. Hopefully things will improve in the future. As such I think these core docs will not be updated just for 4.4, but I will produce a combined update when 4.5 comes out.

The other manuals are still making progress, but all are the results of volunteer contributions and thus their rate of progress varies with the availability of the volunteers. Here are the projects that made good progress:

• The Getting Started guide has been updated and integrated into the new official documentation template. We are aiming for a publication very soon.
• Susanne has updated the "TypoScript in 45 minutes" tutorial in German and has made good progress on the English version.

Much of our time recently has been used towards launching a project that had been already planned for a long time: moving the official documentation to DocBook. Things have really started moving recently. More information can be found in the wiki: http://wiki.typo3.org/DocTeam/DocBook_migration

A lot has happened since the last update was published, although there's still very little that's visible.

First of all the relation between the Official Documentation project and the Documentation Team has been clarified. This will be the topic of an official news, to come at a later point.

About the recent work:

1. Susanne Moog has finished porting the TypoScript in 45 minutes tutorial to OpenOffice format. It's now waiting both for peer review (not started, as we have yet to define the process in more details) and for the new official documentation template to be ready.
2. the new Getting Started tutorial, based on the newly released Introduction Package, is making great progress, thanks to Susanne Moog, Martin Holtz and Philipp Gampe. It's still a draft, but it's coming along very nicely.
3. another project has been launched to create an Administrator's Guide: http://news.typo3.org/news/article/a-manual-for-the-typo3-administrators/ . Read the news and contribute!
4. the update of the Core manuals for TYPO3 4.4 are still pending for now, as I had no time to devote to it unfortunately. Hopefully this will happen during the month of August. You should expect at least one big change: the TCA will have its own reference, making the Core API manual smaller and easier to read through.
5. during T3DD10 the project to have a central TypoScript reference was started. The ultimate goal is that this reference be used for both the t3editor system extension and the TSref, as well as making it possible to build a TypoScript reference online.

I just released an updated version of the TSRef (4.3.2). It contains a number of small bugfixes which are listed in the ChangeLog. It also contains important improvements to a couple of objects or properties and I would like to draw your attention to these:

• typolink.parameter: someone pointed out that the description of this property was not very clear (http://forge.typo3.org/issues/22117). I could only agree with that. When I started digging into it, I realized that this was not the only issue. Some features were actually undocumented. I hope you will find the new explanations clearer, but you may also learn a couple of things ;-)
• the description of the CASE object was incomplete. In particular, the description of CASE.key halted in mid-sentence, but it seems like no one noticed until now (credits go to Steffen Kamper). This was an opportunity to improve the whole description of CASE.
• config.additionalHeaders was also very incompletely described and contained some actual mistakes. This has been fixed too.

Enjoy!

I mean to write more or less regular reports about the state of the Official Documentation, but I don't expect to stick to a strict frequency. So these reports will be "unmonthly".

You may get the feeling that little has happened since the release of the refreshed Core APIs, but that's because most of the action happened behind the scene. So what's up?

1. thanks to Susanne Moog, a new version of the Frontend Localization Guide was published. There was no change in the content (except for fixing some typos), but it was moved to the new documentation template. It is not yet in the Official Documentation repository, because the sub-project's creation is pending, but it will join the project soon.
2. work has started to make "TypoScript in 45 minutes" an official tutorial. The sub-project exists and Susanne has started working on a final version.
3. personally I have started revamping "TypoScript Syntax and In-Depth Study". I mean to move stuff there that was dispatched in various documents, in particular some that are desperately obsolete (like "TypoScript templates").
4. the very definition of "Official Documentation" has also been discussed in the documentation mailing list (typo3.projects.documentation) and good progress has been made, in particular thanks to the input of the Web-Empowered Church team. I hope to be able to officially write about this soon, as I think it's a major and exciting improvement (if you can't wait, just join the documentation mailing list).
5. although this is not strictly related to the Official Documentation, system extensions "felogin" and "css_styled_content" have been blessed with fully rewritten manuals, so there's real progress in documentation these days.

Stay tuned for more and see you again in some undefined period!

A lot of work went into this new version. Actually it's probably the largest update since Kasper produced the original document.

Obviously the main work was to include documentation of all the news features introduced in TYPO3 4.3 (or most of them at least, since some bits are missing like the new cache framework, unfortunately). For a list of all the new stuff, please refer to the TYPO3 wiki:

http://wiki.typo3.org/index.php/Documentation_changes_in_4.3#Core_APIs_.28doc_core_api.29

Another major changes is that most screenshots were refreshed, which was long overdue. Many thanks go to Susanne Moog who provided a lot of the screenshots. Some old shots were left as is, mostly because they were in parts of the manual that need to be totally revamped, but were left as is for now. I made the choice to leave some parts untouched simply because it represented too much work and I didn't want to delay the release of this update for much longer.

A large number of bugs were also fixed.

Code examples¶

The last major change (but not the least, as it is customary to say) is that quite a few of the code examples that appear in the Core APIs have been packaged in an extension called "examples", which was released to the TER today too. There are two goals to this:

1. make it convenient for users to get their hands on the code and reuse it
2. simplify the documentation maintainers' lives by making it possible to install a single extension and having all the configuration necessary to reproduce many of the screenshots.