Categories:Development
Created by Benni Mack, Michael Schams
Today, the TYPO3 community released the latest Long Term Support version of the enterprise content management system TYPO3.
18 months after TYPO3 v7 LTS was released in November 2015, we proudly reach the next milestone in the TYPO3 history. TYPO3 v8 LTS (aka version 8.7) comes with tons of new features, improvements and exciting changes - and it is lightning fast!
Performance
PHP version 7 powers TYPO3 now, which provides a significant performance boost. Working in the backend has never been so smooth before, which is also based on the fact that “Standalone Fluid” is used (see further details below) and most parts of ExtJS were replaced.
Due to the fact that Twitter Bootstrap and jQuery are used more consequently, the backend is fully mobile responsive now and even works on smartphones like a charm.
The positive feedback from editors and agencies around the world about the image manipulation functionalities introduced in TYPO3 v7 LTS convinced the TYPO3 developers to take image cropping one step further. Areas and aspect ratios can be predefined for specific devices now (for example "mobile" and "desktop") and editors can pick a focal point of images. This makes images in the frontend responsive and always perfectly positioned on any device - big, small and tiny.
Forget everything you know about form creation! Here comes the next generation of a point-and-click, drag-and-drop, web-based form building tool. A stunning “Form Framework” was introduced in TYPO3 v8 LTS, that allows editors to create all kind of amazing forms of all sizes and complexities with just a few mouse clicks. No programming knowledge is required and the usage is so intuitive, even documentation is (almost) redundant. On top of that, every form is stored as a YAML configuration file, which means it can be exported, shared and optionally maintained in a Git repository for example.
The well known “<link http: ckeditor.com>CKEditor” replaces the previously used editor “HtmlArea“ in TYPO3 v8 LTS and lays the foundation for much more sophisticated frontend editing features in the near future, currently developed by Swedish web agency Pixelant AB. The new RTE in TYPO3 is much easier to configure now and comes with some awesome features.
Read more about the upcoming frontend editing features <link record:tt_news:2197>in this news article.
With the introduction of <link http: www.doctrine-project.org projects dbal.html>Doctrine DBAL in TYPO3 v8 LTS, the application is decoupled from a specific database system. Doctrine is a database abstraction layer, well known and widely accepted in the PHP universe. It supports MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, etc. for example - so does TYPO3 now.
Presuming extension developers have used the Extbase framework and abstained from using direct SQL queries, no code updates are required.
The multi-language capabilities provided by TYPO3 are legendary. There are not many open source content management systems on the market which can compete. Now editors can choose if a label should be inherited from an existing language or overwritten by a translation. This works for almost all fields in the backend (e.g. an image title or subtitle) and is selectable per content element rather than a global configuration.
Standalone Fluid
Fluid is now much more flexible, comes with tremendous new features and was decoupled from the core. This means, several components of Fluid, which were completely internal and impossible to replace, have been fitted with a public API and can be replaced as required now. Check out the new ViewHelpers and be amazed by some of the simplifications in TYPO3 v8 LTS. Believe it or not - you can also integrate the template engine Fluid in other frameworks such as Symfony or Laravel for example.
Installation, Upgrade and Support
TYPO3 v8 LTS can be installed via <link https: composer.typo3.org>composer or the traditional way, by downloading and extracting the package at <link>typo3.org/download. Existing instances can be upgraded, if they use TYPO3 version 7.6 or later. Make sure, the underlying infrastructure meets the <link>minimum requirements (e.g. PHP 7).
TYPO3 v8 LTS will receive regular maintenance and bugfixes until October 2018 and security and critical bugfixes until April 2020.
Further Details
Interested in all the details? Download the “<link download release-notes whats-new>What’s New Slides” of the TYPO3 v8 LTS release or the comprehensive slides of each Sprint Release. We also published news for each 8.x release:
The TYPO3 Team would like to thank all contributors for making this milestone become reality. Many thanks for all your development work, reporting bugs, reviewing and testing fixes and new features, maintaining the infrastructure, sponsoring an event, spreading the word about the system we all love: TYPO3.
