TYPO3 v9.2.0 released

The sprint release version 9.2 focuses on “Site Handling” and will boost the productivity of editors, push the creativity of developers and ease the life of integrators.

Let’s have a closer look what bang you get for your buck.

A site configuration has a unique (human-readable) identifier and configuration values such as the root page ID, the base path (entry point), language definitions, etc. By storing the settings in a YAML file under “typo3conf/sites/site-identifier/”, it is easy to maintain the configuration in a version control system such as Git for example.

The Site Handling functionality already supports configurations such as domains, languages, error-handling and will be extended further until the the v9 LTS release later this year.

If the backend debug mode is enabled ([BE][debug] = 1), the real values of fields are displayed in square brackets to backend users with administrator privileges. This enhances the recently introduced feature of showing field names even further.

If the improvements and new features described above are not exciting and technical enough, you are probably a hard-core PHP developer!

TYPO3’s reputation of being a dinosaur on the CMS market does not mean, the code base can not feature contemporary technologies and adopt modern software paradigms. Earlier this year, the PSR-15 middleware specification was officially released. The PSR-15 standard is defined as follows:

“[PSR-15] describes common interfaces for HTTP server request handlers (request handlers) and HTTP server middleware components (middleware) that use HTTP messages [...]. HTTP request handlers are a fundamental part of any web application. Server side code receives a request message, processes it, and produces a response message. HTTP middleware is a way to move common request and response processing away from the application layer.”

TYPO3 aims to support PSR-15 middlewares out-of-the box. This approach will improve interoperability with independent libraries and all requests in the TYPO3 core will return a PSR-7 response. As one of the first enterprise content management systems on the market, TYPO3 version 9.2 introduces PSR-15 middlewares in the frontend, as well as in the backend.

TYPO3 v9 LTS (scheduled release date in November 2018) aims to avoid constants and global variables if possible. Therefore, a new class “Environment” was developed, which acts as a central place for storing properties commonly used throughout the core. This class also contains methods that are relevant for all kind of PHP, CLI and web requests.

The SwiftMailer project provides a sophisticated PHP library, that is the de-facto standard for creating and sending RFC compliant emails in PHP with a multitude of features. SwiftMailer has been integrated in TYPO3 since version 4.5.

With TYPO3 version 9.2, it is now possible to leverage SwiftMailer’s queue functionality - also known as “spool transport”. In most cases, developers want to send out emails immediately, but under certain circumstances, “spooling” emails and processing them later is beneficial, e.g. for performance reasons. Therefore, we are happy to announce, that the Mail API of TYPO3 version 9.2 now supports SwiftMailer’s “SpoolTransport” functionality.

Mails can be queued in memory (and only sent, if the HTTP request did not cause an exception or error) or in files. If latter, the sending of spooled emails can be triggered by a command line call or by a scheduler task. In both cases, the number of emails to process can be limited, as well as the maximum time.

Security has always been one of TYPO3’s top priorities and as we know, hardening the security of a system is an ongoing process.

TYPO3 stores various files in the “var/” directory, which is typically located under “typo3temp/var/”. Some of these files are for example Install Tool session files, caching framework files, files related to locking or logging, Extension Manager data files or files generated by TYPO3’s import/export or core update functions. Despite the fact that a properly configured web server and TYPO3 instance prevents accessing any sensible files in the “var/” directory, it is obvious that these are non-public files, which should better be located outside the web root.

As part of the ongoing effort to enhance the security of TYPO3 even further, the path to the “var/” directory can now be configured as an environment variable TYPO3_PATH_APP. The following configuration directive can be used by the Apache web server for example:

SetEnv TYPO3_PATH_APP /var/www/example.com/

This would instruct TYPO3 to create and use directory “/var/www/example.com/var/” whereas the web root should be “/var/www/example.com/htdocs/”. If the environment variable is not set, non-composer installations of TYPO3 continue to use “typo3temp/var/” as the default. Composer-based installations benefit from this functionality directly, as data is stored within the project roots' folder under “var/”.

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 just two. Further details can be found at get.typo3.org/version/9.

To learn more about the new features, changes and improvements of TYPO3 version 9.2, have a look at the TYPO3 What’s New Slides or the detailed technical change log.

The next release on our road to the LTS version of TYPO3 v9 will be version 9.3, currently scheduled to be released in June 2018. The focus for this release is on URL routing for pages. You can find the release agenda in the TYPO3 Roadmap.

Until then, we would like to encourage you to check out TYPO3 version 9.2, embrace the new features and improvements, share your thoughts and report issues. There are also some exciting development initiatives, where you can get be involved to shape the future of TYPO3.