In the last five months the TYPO3 community has worked on the next TYPO3 release - TYPO3 CMS 6.1 - which was published today. It is a continuous improvement over the previous version, targeting stability over new features, and polishing the previously introduced functionalities.
After a groundbreaking and successful milestone release of TYPO3 CMS 6.0 in November 2012, the next step was naturally to build on this foundation and focus on stability and consistency through the code-base and the user-interface. With over 570 contributions in this development phase, a lot of finetuning was done in mostly the following areas.
The Database Connection class, the layer between the raw PHP functions for connecting to MySQL (or via DBAL to other database platforms) has used PHPs built-in module "mysql", which is available since PHP 2.0 (= almost forever ;-)). Since PHP 5.0 this module has been superseeded by the shipped-by-default module "mysqli" (note the "i" at the end), which is the recommended database connection API for mysql (see <link http: www.php.net manual en mysqlinfo.api.choosing.php>php.net). TYPO3 CMS 6.1 now uses the mysqli API. Extensions that use the Database Connection layer correctly should not notice any difference.
The File Abstraction Layer, the unified handling for working with files throughout the TYPO3 system, has had its difficulties in handling the deletion of a file that was still in use. This issue was solved in a clean way. When indexing new, replaced or modified files the indexing service detects these changes easier.
The Extension Manager module - the heart of the extension maintainability - was code-wise ported to Extbase/Fluid for TYPO3 CMS 6.0, thus separating the visual output (Fluid) from the logic and the DB and TER handling (done in Extbase). However, the UI of the module was not completely integrated in the Backend interface. The look & feel was therefore adapted to conform to the user experience defaults that are common in other modules, making it easier and more comfortable to use.
Detailed information about more changes can be found in the <link>release notes.
The packages can be found on the <link>download page of TYPO3.org. The next version, the long-term-support version TYPO3 CMS 6.2, is already in development phase and scheduled for October 2013.
Finally, BIG thanks go to all supporters, contributors and organizers in the last months to make this release possible.
