TYPO3 v9.1.0 released

Categories: Development, TYPO3 CMS, Core Development Created by TYPO3 Core Team
TYPO3 V9.1
Exactly seven weeks after the first sprint release of TYPO3 v9, we are delighted to announce that TYPO3 version 9.1 has been published as planned today. With more than 70 bug fixes, almost 100 completed development tasks and a couple of new features, this release is the next step on the road to version 9 LTS.

Upgrades Behind the Scene

TYPO3 uses well-known, stable and robust third-party open source libraries, developed and actively maintained by their developers and the community. In order to benefit from their continued improvements, integrating updated versions into TYPO3 is vital and an important task. In TYPO3 version 9.1, the database abstraction layer "doctrine" has been updated to version 2.6.3 for example. The rich text editor "CKEditor", used in the backend of TYPO3, has been updated to version 4.8.0. "Moment.js", a sophisticated JavaScript library to parse, validate, manipulate, and display dates and times, has been updated to version 2.20.1.

Having said that, the main focus of TYPO3 version 9.1 was on the new “redirects module” and we are happy to confirm, that we are perfectly on track with the development.

Backend Main Module "Site Management"

TYPO3 version 9.1 features a new main module "Site Management" in the backend. It completes the existing modules "Web", "File", "Admin Tools" and "System" and aims to become the central place for all site-related configuration tasks, e.g. languages, domains and routing.

The first sub-module of "Site Management" is the new "Redirects" Module.

Redirects Module

There are several methods how a request to a web server or the web application is processed. The first request to a resource does not always result in a HTML page for example. Redirecting the user to a specific different resource (e.g. a file or page) is not unusual.

A new backend module named "Redirects" has been introduced in TYPO3 version 9.1. As the name suggests, it allows TYPO3 integrators and editors to configure redirects for their website. The redirects can be limited to a specific domain and the HTTP response code can easily be configured. On top of that, the source path can be enabled to be represented as a regular expression and a redirect to HTTPS can be enforced if required.

Redirects are an important part of every SEO strategy and often used for marketing campaigns to implement a short, meaningful URL, which possibly does not match the page structure in TYPO3.

This new module makes the old redirect feature obsolete and therefore, the option to configure a redirect, when a domain was added to a specific page or page branch, has been removed.

Show Field Names in Debug Context

TYPO3 integrators and developers often deal with input fields in the backend and need to know the corresponding name in the database. If the debug mode is enabled in TYPO3, the field name of every FormEngine field is shown to admin users in the backend now. This also makes the process of configuring access rights much easier, because the same field names appear when backend users or user groups are configured.

Feature Toggles

Another exciting new feature of TYPO3 version 9.1 comes in the form of a new API class "Features". This allows to check if a feature is enabled/disabled in a TYPO3 instance. The main benefit is, that new features can not only be developed in parallel to existing features and simply switched on and off, but also to have admins switch to new features explicitly or disable legacy programmatically.

Further changes

As pointed out above, many further changes, clean-ups, bug fixes, etc. have been made in the last few weeks since the release of TYPO3 version 9.0. The complete changelog of version 9.1 is available at docs.typo3.org.

Download

TYPO3 can be installed in various ways. For example the traditional way by using the source package at typo3.org or the modern way by setting up a project using composer, to name two options only. Further details can be found at get.typo3.org/version/9.

What's Next

The next release on our road to the LTS version of TYPO3 v9 will be version 9.2, currently scheduled to be released in April 2018. The focus for this release is on adding more functions to the “Site Management” module. Read more about the release agenda at the TYPO3 Roadmap.

Until then, we would like to encourage you to check out TYPO3 version 9.1, embrace the new features and improvements, share your thoughts and help us shaping the application by reporting issues and contributing to the project.