BAAR - Today the TYPO3 Core Team has released the latest version of their very successful Open Source Project. Where 4.0 mainly focused on improving usability features on the editor level, version 4.1.0 also brings many like improvements to System Administrators and developers. The most eye-catching features are Inline Relational Record Editing (IRRE), AJAX Page and File Tree, command line based clean-up functions, and an improved Extension Manager.
The functionality IRRE provides is groundbreaking in the relational editing capabilities of the TYPO3 core elements. The main feature is as simple as editing sub-records inside the parent record and being able to add new sub-records just by clicking on an icon. This greatly simplifies editing of related records in TYPO3 and makes it possible to work with complex data structures in the TYPO3 Backend from a single window versus many.
A new AJAX Page and File Tree makes expanding and collapsing branches of the page and file tree in the TYPO3 Backend much quicker while lowering system load. Editors and administrators will benefit from this since expanding the page tree doesn't require the whole page to be refreshed any more. Instead the system only fetches what is needed.
Version 4.1 features a brand new command line interface from where System Administrators can execute a range of command line scripts written by Kasper Skårhøj. This "low level" system extension has functions for checking database integrity and cleaning up such as lost files and references, flushing deleted records and published versions and much more. There is a howto-text file inside the low level extension that describes in detail how the process should be run.
The Extension Manager has been improved in a manner that it now stores the list of extensions from the TYPO3 Extension Manager (TER) in the local database. This not only speeds up processes but also requires less memory, which is of great importance for a Content Management System that is used not only on enterprise level but also on large scale in smaller business environments.
4.1 includes a number of other performance enhancements in both page caching and database access. TYPO3 sites running on shared hosting platforms with tight memory limits will welcome these new features.
Besides these major improvements, the new release contains dozens of smaller features, system enhancements, and bug fixes. This version focuses clearly on usability in every aspect of the system as the one goal that has been set by the Development Team for all 4.x releases.
TYPO3 version 4.1 can be directly downloaded from get.typo3.org/.