Life after 4.0

Categories: Development Created by ben van 't ende
So here we are with the final release of TYPO3 4.0. A lot has been going on in the Content Rendering Group.
I never expected the content rendering list become the battleground that it was for the last few weeks, despite the history of other TYPO3 lists ;-) I can distinctly remember the times when a TYPOLIST, a table representing a list, was a part of TYPO3. Things have changed since then and the subject of output has grown increasingly important for many well known reasons. I am pleased to see its importance recognized, and I would like to make some pragmatic remarks here without answering the previous threads in the Content Rendering List.

There have been so many people who helped the CRG out from its beginning.. Ideas Rupert and I had for accessible tables were picked up by Sebastian for integration into the core. Kai added his improvements over the course of several betas. The accessible menus, which I converted to Typoscript, were integrated by Sebastian. After some problems and some useful input by JoH, they are pretty much finished in 4.0. How about Ernesto's work for IMGTEXT? This is such a difficult undertaking and a LOT of feedback is required for a good end result. I think a little work might still need to be done there. How about Stucki's great work in getting a separate indexed search template and a css based one as well? Thanks Michael! As a matter of fact, thanks to a lot of guys mentioned on the CRG WIKI pages (still some lazy bastards on that list, doh). The mailform has escaped my attention, even though Rupert and myself started it. There was some heated debate about this subject, accusing the core developers of not to caring about accessibility. These are the people that helped CRG get our feature requests into the core. As Michael stated earlier, almost all work is being done in our spare time. To see such an effort involving so many people succeed is inspiring.

Unfortunately there was the pressure of a FINAL release of TYPO3 4.0. This had to be done on time! With so many factors involved like DAM, TemplaVoila, CI, and the new skin, it was inevitable that this time is now. A 4.0.1 release is in the pipeline and a number of issues will be fixed there.

Today Sebastian has added two new categories to the bugtracker (<link http: bugs.typo3.org>bugs.typo3.org). Content Rendering and the subcategory tx_cssstyledcontent. The issues that first resided on <link http: wiki.typo3.org index.php content_rendering>wiki.typo3.org/index.php/Content_Rendering have now been moved to the Bugtracker. This will hopefully allow us to fix issues more quickly and in a more organized way.

Finally, I am proud to say that <link http: news.typo3.org>news.typo3.org is XHTML strict! news.typo3.org has been live for over a year now, with the first article is dated 1. April 2005. Please also have a look at <link news rss.xml>news.typo3.org/news/rss.xml where you can find a nice example of a news feed styled with XSLT, thanks to Rupert. To quote Rupert: "XSLT is pretty cool!"