Releasing TYPO3 v8.4

Categories: Development Created by TYPO3 CMS Core Team
The TYPO3 community released the next sprint release of TYPO3 v8. We have been working like crazy to push TYPO3 further, and 8.4 is a great intermediate step towards our planned LTS version, which is going to be released in April 2017.
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The core contributors finally made it possible to go fully mobile for the TYPO3 backend. The fine line between "responsive" and a mobile-ready version has been resolved, as the navigation menu and the full backend functionality adapts not just for tablets, but adapts based on the screen resolution to have the best user experience depending on the device. The dusted ExtJS viewport functionality has been completely replaced with a native JavaScript / jQuery + CSS solution. Kudos to Kay Strobach and Benjamin Kott for putting lots of days and nights into this work. As for the removal of ExtJS in the TYPO3 Core, the only parts left are the Page Tree, the form extension drag+drop functionality and the ExtDirect functionality, which will be worked on as part of the next steps.

Doctrine DBAL

Big improvements have been seen by migrating all database calls of the TYPO3 Core to Doctrine DBAL, however some major accomplishments have been achieved in the last weeks:
  • Extbase's persistence is now also built completely on Doctrine DBAL's QueryBuilder, allowing to have prepared statements for all Extbase queries out-of-the-box - while still keeping major backwards-compatibility for most Extbase extensions.
  • As the whole TYPO3 core now uses doctrine, the previously shipped and now obsolete extensions "dbal" and its foundation "adodb" have been moved to the TER into separate community extensions and repositories. If you've been using them previously, there is an update wizard to re-install these extensions.

Documentation

Although coding is fun, documentation is a key part of introducing new APIs and how they should behave, but also how extension developers can use the API properly. We have released a new section in our Core API documentation on how to use the new Doctrine DBAL API - it's quite extensive and should cover all sections and best practices needed for developers - you can find them here: <link https: docs.typo3.org typo3cms coreapireference database>docs.typo3.org/typo3cms/CoreApiReference/Database/ 
The install tool, which is also a heavily used feature during updates between TYPO3 versions, has received some more beauty, basically finding all documented changes with a cool filter to show what is relevant for an integrator, extension author or site owner. Although this is already pretty cool, stay tuned for even better features to make migrations even easier between TYPO3 versions! The migration and deprecation of existing options and switching within the TCA definitions we have in place since TYPO3 v7, is also visible in the Install Tool now.

Further changes

As usual, we have some small but nice changes in TYPO3. For a full changelog, see our documentations for more information: <link https: docs.typo3.org typo3cms extensions core changelog index.html>docs.typo3.org/typo3cms/extensions/core/8-dev/Changelog/8.4/Index.html

Download it now

You can find TYPO3 v8.4 on our <link>downloads page, get it via <link https: wiki.typo3.org composer>Composer or try out the <link https: github.com tuurlijk typo3.homestead>virtual machine to play around with the latest development version. Please make sure you have PHP7 running on your target system, as this is the base requirement for TYPO3 v8.

What's next

You might have read the official kickoff for TYPO3 v8 to use <link https: platform.sh>platform.sh as a cloud provider out-of-the-box, be sure to read what’s coming up next - we have some more goodies in the pipelines. TYPO3 8.5 is scheduled for December 20th, 2016, and will surely be packed with even more functionality while also stabilizing the changes we have done so far.