TYPO3 Forge

This manual had last been updated for TYPO3 4.2, and even then it wasn't a full refresh. Some parts were pretty old and some screenshots dated all the way back to TYPO3 3.6.0-dev. Needless to say that tackling this manual was akin to doing an archeological dig!

There is not much left of the original content, since TYPO3 had changed so much in the meantime. I have rewritten quite a few chapters entirely, but also removed quite a lot of them, either because their content was not relevant anymore or because it was found somewhere else. In particular, the walkthrough of many backend features is now in the Getting Started Tutorial. Also everything relating to versioning and workspaces was moved to the manual of the "workspaces" system extension, which also benefited from a full update in the process.

What appears to me now is that the separation of Core APIs and Inside TYPO3 is not so clear anymore and could probably be reviewed, with content moved between the two for better consistency. However this does not seem very urgent, nor absolutely necessary for now. The downside is probably a bit of confusion for the readers.

Due to the fact that much content could be removed rather than having to be updated, I also reached this milestone faster than expected (although this update was still more than 100 hours of work!). This leaves me with quite a few hours of budget to tackle other manuals beyond the originally planned items in my budget request.

The new home of the GIT-repository can be found at
https://github.com/JanBartels/wec_map

For issues please use the bugtracker on
https://forge.typo3.org/projects/extension-wec_map/issues

Since the migration of SVN to GIT the workflow and the setup has become troublesome on typo3.org while github is easy to use. For this reason I moved the repository from typo3.org to github.

• Major Feature #73635: Raise compatibility to PHP 7
• Bug #76630: Cookie protection only working after page refresh
• Bug #76650: First rating won't show up after AJAX response
• Task #76597: Check for impact of "Deprecation: #65790 - Remove pages.storage_pid and logic"
  BREAKING CHANGE
  • Please check your configuration after upgrade!
  • The constant plugin.tx_thrating.settings.feUserStoragePid will be removed and replaced by the value of plugin.tx_felogin.storagePid
  • New setting ''plugin.tx_felogin.storagePid'' is now required
  • Clear cache after installation/upgrade
• Task #76601: Check for impact of "Feature: #68700 - Autoload definition can be provided in ext_emconf.php"

The Repository has been moved to Github.

This new version also comes with new features. The most prominent one is the new backend module. In fact External Import now comes with its own main module, since it wasn't possible to keep it under the "User Tools" module. This was the opportunity to actually rewrite the whole module. It is now based on Extbase and has dropped usage of ExtJS. Hopefully this will make it more future proof.

A logging feature was added, to be able to track when imports are taking place and their result. A backend module is provided to view and filter the logs. This was a somewhat last minute addition to the current release. It is functional but could probably be improved a bit.

Another new feature is the configuration validator. It will check known configuration errors, like a missing mandatory property or mismatched properties. All in all it can catch about 15 configuration errors and report about them in the detail view of the backend module. The configuration validator is also called before any import. If an error is detected, the import will be aborted.

Under the hood, a lot has changed: all classes were moved to namespaces, some properties have been renamed. Please make sure to read the section about upgrading in the manual (https://docs.typo3.org/typo3cms/extensions/external_import/3.0.0/Installation/Index.html#installation-upgrade-300). Also the language files were all moved to stick to a clean file structure. Unfortunately this means that existing translations on translation.typo3.org are lost.

The External Import Tutorial (extension key: externalimport_tut) has been updated accordingly (and released as version 2.0.0).

toctoc_comments 9.1.0 rating component includes new emoLikes (reactions like on Facebook), new ViewHelpers for news working on TYPO3 7 and newer and an important update for the Facebook-login

Find the newsarticle on version 9.1.0 here on our website:
https://www.toctoc.ch/newsdetail/newsarticle/summer-update-for-ajax-social-network-components/

Source on Github: https://github.com/giselew/toctoc_comments

Announcement 9.2.0:
- Old CSS and theme.txt and boxmodel.txt based-CSS modifications will be entirely dropped as I did announce last summer.
All CSS of the frontend is in the LESS-model (CSS is generated automatically from LESS by toctoc_comments).
LESS is available since version 8.0.0.

- Caching will be extended by a cache on the database.
It will speed up a little the normal plugin mode, it will speed up heavily reports on the data such as recent comments or top ratings.
It will reduce the amount of data exchange with the client quite drastically - all the long encoded strings you find in the HTML-source will be replaced.

• Bug #76591: Compatibility fix for TYPO3 7.6
• Bug #75951: Core: Error handler (BE): PHP Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in ..../th_rating/Classes/Service/TCALabelUserFuncService.php line 168
• Suggestion #76593: Add cookieLifetime to global constant settings
• Bug #76592: Cookieprotection not working when configured in plugin.tx_thrating.ratings
• Bug #76605: Invalid HTML generated nesting of DIV whithin UL-tag
• Task #76602: TYPO3 7.6 Deprecation: #69822 - Deprecate TCA settings of select fields

The TypoScript Syntax and In-Depth Study reference is up to date again.

Apart from updating the screenshots, I have also performed some extensive editorial work to improve the texts, with the aim of making them as much as possible clearer and more concise.

I have also strongly restructured some chapters to make the organisation of the manual more logical. There were several redundancies (like multiple places explaining the difference between TypoScript Templates and User/Pages TSconfig). One chapter was meant to dig into the topic in more details, but contained information which was better placed in other chapter for more consistent reading experience.

I removed some obsolete stuff from the chapter about the TypoScript parser API. It really would have deserved a complete rewrite, because the example looks really quaint and the part about custom condition, while still valid, is not quite up to par with best practices from TYPO3 CMS 7+, but time was running out for me on that milestone in my budget. I may come back to it at a later point.

https://docs.typo3.org/typo3cms/TyposcriptSyntaxReference/

The Templating Tutorial (Basics) is now up to date again.

More than refreshed, it was really refactored. This tutorial was accompanied by files delivered via the extension called "doc_tut_templating". I have now made this extension into a distribution, which makes it possible to deliver not only the files but also a basic page tree with a few content elements. This greatly simplifies the early steps of the tutorial, which were redundant with the Editors Tutorial.

I have reworked a lot of the content, which was quite verbose. It is now often shorter and more to the point. I removed the chapter about "optionSplit", which was confusing, and referred readers to the TypoScript Reference instead.

This ended up being a lot of work and this time I used all the time I had planned in this budget milestone.

I am pleased to report that I have finished updating the TypoScript in 45 Minutes Tutorial for TYPO3 CMS 7 LTS.

Actually this was much more than an update. I have rewritten a sizeable part of the manual to improve the quality of the language used, simplify some explanations and throw out some excessively technical and confusing insights into more advanced topics.

I also added a bit of material, in particular a presentation of the TypoScript function "getText", as I consider it to be quite fundamental in the every day usage of TypoScript.

All in all this took longer than for the other tutorials I already worked on, but I still finished my work in less time than expected, thus continuing on a pretty good track.

This corresponds to Milestone 3 of my budget application (see https://forge.typo3.org/boards/31/topics/784).