Wiki¶

Goal¶

TYPO3 should provide a usable API for form handling to be used by the core itself and third party extensions dealing with forms (Formhandler, Powermail, Better Contact, ...).
The main goal of this project is to start off with a solid base functionality for validation and captcha integration. The main focus should be to make the structure usable and easy extendable. This way new functionality can easily be integrated in future releases of TYPO3.

Status quo¶

TYPO3 ships with a basic form element providing functionality for simple single step mail forms. There is work going on to implement a new FORM object for TYPO3 under the lead of Patrick Broens.
Besides, there a plenty of extensions in the TER, focussing on form handling or having to deal with forms.
TYPO3 provides no usable API functions to assist the developers of any of these projects. Allthough there are some utility functions like t3lib_div::validEmail() or t3lib_div::testInt(), this is not satisfying at all.

What do the others do?¶

• Zend_Form in Zend Framework
• Validation in Spring Framework
• Clonefish validation framework
• CakePHP

How TYPO3 could do it?¶

• TYPO3 includes a nice mechanism called "services", which could fit perfectly for offering nice and extendable captcha checks and validation routines.
• The Zend Framework seems to have a very nice way of dealing with forms. We will investigate if and how TYPO3 could provide similar functionality.

The progress¶

• Summary of the first brainstorming session (August, 31 2010).

Useful links¶

Brainstorming sessions of other projects¶

• http://wiki.typo3.org/index.php/Form_Wizard_for_TYPO3_4.2
• http://wiki.typo3.org/index.php/Form_Structure_for_TYPO3_4.3