TYPO3 4.6alpha1 released

Categories: Development Created by Xavier Perseguers

Today, the TYPO3 community released the first alpha version of TYPO3 4.6. This marks the start of our journey to the next major release of our CMS: TYPO3 4.6 --rebase.


What happened so far?
Today, the TYPO3 community released the first alpha version of TYPO3 4.6. This marks the start of our journey to the next major release of our CMS: TYPO3 4.6 --rebase. Release 4.6.0 will be ready by October 2011. This alpha version is a "developer snapshot" to show the progress so far.

After the kick-off for the 4.6 development during the TYPO3 Code Sprint in Berlin on March, the release manager Xavier Perseguers started contacting individuals and teams that were already working on projects that were planned for inclusion in 4.6.

The Skype meetings introduced by the release team of 4.5 (Ernesto Baschny and Steffen Kamper) proved to have been fruitful for both the release team and the community and we naturally decided to keep them up. These meetings are hold on a weekly basis together with the TYPO3 community manager (Ben van 't Ende) and the core team leaders.

The 4.5 release brought the community a new stable version of TYPO3 which has been stamped "LTS" for Long Term Support. As such, many cleanup that were initially targeted at 4.5 such as the removal of deprecated code have been postponed to ensure an upgrade path as smooth as possible.

But now 4.6 is on its way and we decided to include breaking changes as soon as possible. This is why following breaking changes are already part of this alpha1 release:

  • PHP 5.3: PHP 5.3.0 is available since nearly two years and is now included in all stable releases of major web server package repositories. As such, PHP 5.3.0 or above is now mandatory.
  • Safe mode: Although still supported by PHP 5.3 (but deprecated), safe mode is not supported anymore.
  • IE6: Internet Explorer 6 is not supported anymore for the TYPO3 backend. This means that the community will not care anymore if some functionality is not working or not displayed as it should when using IE6. If you are forced to use this obsolete browser, you should not use TYPO3 4.6 but keep using 4.5 LTS instead. Of course, TYPO3 still lets you targeting the frontend part at IE6.
  • ImageMagick: Support for ImageMagick v4 and v5 has been dropped.ImageMagick v6 or GraphicsMagick is now mandatory.

Development progress

The release plan for 4.6, the schedule and the planned projects are detailed in the <link http: forge.typo3.org projects typo3v46-projects wiki _blank>project wiki on forge.

For details about this particular release and the current progress, please read up on:

<link http: forge.typo3.org projects typo3v46-projects wiki typo3_460alpha1 _blank>forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v46-projects/wiki/TYPO3_460alpha1

Downloads

For the first alpha an introductionpackage was build, which allows testing the new features right away on a fresh installation. Experienced users can of course opt to upgrade an existing installation to the new 4.6alpha1 version, but keeping in mind that this is still a snapshot of our development so far, and more changes and fixes will be included in further releases.

You can download the Alpha packages from:

<link http: typo3.org download packages _blank>typo3.org/download/packages/

MD5 checksums:

1c2853d65678f279ae4816807aa71336  typo3_src-4.6.0alpha1.tar.gz
3d93d9414adab991c69c15a4dbc11062  typo3_src-4.6.0alpha1.zip
96c631d83588107b76e94329399f6c45  blankpackage-4.6.0alpha1.tar.gz
ac4005b463ddd986511b365866eb8db8  blankpackage-4.6.0alpha1.zip
031746cb6e6513432aae0f15957da586  introductionpackage-4.6.0alpha1.tar.gz
5ddd53eb4ecc323f717e0ddbe9d3f76d  introductionpackage-4.6.0alpha1.zip