By Thomas Esders
Although the TYPO3 developers clearly write down all changes, it is not very easy to understand and convenient for people who just want to know the interesting changes. This document aims to give you a short sum-up.
Intended Audience
This document is made for all TYPO3 users who would like to have a short overview of what is new or has changed in the new TYPO3 release version 4.0.
New features
Workspaces
Workspaces enable you to edit your page in the “draft workspace” without touching the live website. In TYPO3 3.8.1 and below it was only possible to edit the live content, or to use the versioning extension to make a “copy” of an object (page or content), edit this and swap it with the “live” version. But the versioning itself was rather complex to handle. The concept of workspaces now makes it possible to use the versioning mechanisms with a new GUI. You can now have a copy of all your objects (pages, content, even entire websites) and edit these without changing your live content. This is called the “draft” workspace. You can add or change content in a "draft" workspace and publish the changes into the "live" workspace. Backend users can be configured to only edit the draft workspace.
For more details please see [1].
RTE
The default RTE (WYSIWYG-Editor) has been switched. Now “HTMLArea” is used instead of the old Microsoft-only RTE-component. HTMLArea is compatible with more browsers and operating systems (Internet Explorer, Firefox; Linux, BSD, Mac OS X). HTMLArea is a system extension.
For more details please see [3].
TemplaVoila
The alternative templating engine TemplaVoila celebrates its first major release after going through a major overhaul and refactoring during the last months. After proving it's usefuleness for almost two years now, TemplaVoila is now considered to be an official part of TYPO3.
Behind the scenes a new unit-tested API has been created which allows extensions developers for taking advantage of TemplaVoila specific operations in their own applications. Working with content has become much easier, as TemplaVoila now seemlessly integrates into the TYPO3 framework – the common clipboard and the list module can be used like in non-TemplaVoila driven websites. Other important features of TemplaVoila 1.0 are an improved localization and translation handling, full workspaces support, an improved mapping tool and more than 150 bugfixes and detail improvements suggested by the community.
Although necessary modifcations are minimal, it is recommended that user who upgrade from previous versions of TemplaVoila read the upgrading instructions in the extension's manual [11].
Access Control
Frontend usergroups may now be nested. This means that usergroups can contain other usergroups. Another new feature is that access to pages and content elements can now be restricted to more than one usergroup. This means you are more flexible when it comes to access control of content on your website.
Reference Index Table
References to objects in TYPO3 (pages, content, files, etc.) are often used. If, for example, you have a page of type “shortcut”, this is a reference to an existing page. If you delete the original page, your shortcut is broken. With the new reference index table it is possible to keep track of these references. You can use “info” from the context menu of any object to see if a reference from this object or to this object exists. This means it is now possible to decide if an object can be deleted or not.
To fill the index table with data the first time after updating to TYPO3 4.0 go to module “DB check” and choose “Manage Reference Index”. Hit “update now” to fill the reference index table.
DBAL
This new system extension offers database independence (currently working with Oracle and PostgreSQL) and allows flexible distribution of data over multiple databases. You can now use a different database engine other than MySQL.
For more details please see [2].
DAM
The DAM system has been overhauled and enhanced in usability and functionality. For example the DAM provides now an integrated file module, has multilanguage support and can index files by a cron job or automatically. For more details please see [12].
The code base was refactored and an API was introduced. The usage of the API is demonstrated by the DAM demo extension (dam_damo) [13]. While the API changed a bit from the version before, existing extensions might need to be adapted.
Compatibility mode (compatVersion)
One of the big advantages of TYPO3 has always been the seamless backwards compatibility, so upgrading TYPO3 has always been easy and did not break your site. Now, in TYPO3 4.0 some content elements are rendered differently to older TYPO3 versions, which could possibly break the layout of your site because your CSS needs to be adopted. The content elements of which the rendering has changed, are “sitemaps”, “mailforms”, and the “text with image” content element.
Now, in order to not break the output of sites for people who just want to upgrade but do not want the new rendering, TYPO3 can be configured to run in a compatibility mode to 3.8, so content elements will be rendered exactly like in the old days.
When you upgrade from an old version of TYPO3, the 3.8 compatibility mode will be automatically enabled, so if you want to make use of the new features of content rendering, you have to manually disable the compatibility mode. You can do that by going into the Install Tool -> Update Wizard -> ChangeCompatVersion -> confirm that you have read and understood the changes that took place in content rending, and voilà, TYPO3 will output the above mentioned content elements in a nice CSS based way.
