TYPO3 Version 10.2 — Treasure Hunting!

Let’s pick a few outstanding aspects as examples what integrators, administrators, and developers can expect from the new version.

System integrators use the system extension Frontend Login (extension key “felogin”) to provide a simple way for users to log-in and access restricted areas of a website, with a password recovery function as well. However, it was cumbersome for integrators and developers to modify the templates. While all other system extensions use the modern Fluid templating engine, Frontend Login was the only extension that was still based on “Marker-based” templates.

TYPO3 v10.2 now includes an Extbase-version of that frontend login functionality. This solution has a few advantages:

• Modify the templates more easily.
• Send out HTML-based password recovery emails.
• Adjust and modify validators to enforce password restrictions.

The new Extbase plugin is available out-of-the-box for new installations. To avoid losing modifications on existing TYPO3 instances, they will continue to use the old templates by default (use the feature toggle in TYPO3 v10.2 to explicitly enable the Extbase-version).

Integrators should be aware that TYPO3 v11 will only feature the new Extbase variant and Fluid-based templates of the frontend login form.

Based on our experience and the feedback from the community over the last few months, several improvements have been made to the system extension Form. These changes affect editors, integrators as well as developers. Backend users benefit from an enhanced form creation wizard that supports navigating to previous steps and descriptive labels such as “Start” or “Finish”, rather than the numerical indicator “Step x of y”.

Integrators will embrace a streamlined setup (only one general configuration file “FormSetup.yaml” is used) and an optimized configuration structure.

Hooks and the Signal/Slot concept is one of TYPO3’s superpowers. This allows extending the core functionality by emitting a signal and to notify other components about a specific event. Extension developers love this technology and we took it to the next level by introducing PSR-14 events to the TYPO3 core in version 10.0.

Today we are more than happy to announce that all existing Signal/Slots of the TYPO3 core have been migrated to PSR-14 events in TYPO3 v10.2. Existing slots of custom extensions will continue to work but we highly recommend that extension developers should migrate slots to PSR-14 event listeners even now.

To learn how simple it is to migrate to PSR-14 events, developers can review the code change of the FileMetadataOverlayAspect for example.

Widget ViewHelpers set a session cookie in the frontend under certain circumstances, for example when the Autocomplete-ViewHelper is used. To improve user’s privacy and comply with European’s General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR), a boolean argument storeSession can be set to enable/disable the cookie.

Configured as a Scheduler task, TYPO3’s Link Validator aims to detect broken links throughout the system. This indispensable feature has been extended further and now supports pages, files and even external links. External links can also be validated on-the-fly now.

Comfortably browsing through lists of items is a common use-case for websites and web applications alike. The TYPO3 core makes it easy for developers to implement such a solution that is also highly flexible and customizable. The new Pagination API lets users browse any kind of data — from database records to arrays and QueryResults. Everything that is “iterable” can be paginated and the TYPO3 core will make use of this useful API even more in the near future.

This release paves the way for a cutting-edge environment. TYPO3 v10.2 not only supports Symfony version 5.0, but is also the first TYPO3 release that supports PHP version 7.4. This should come as no surprise that our latest sprint release should work with the new version of PHP. However, we are also working on making TYPO3 v9 compatible with PHP 7.4 (without breaking lower versions of course).

TYPO3 v10.2 marks the last release before the feature freeze release in February 2020. Now is the time for TYPO3 extension developers to get familiar with the API and embrace the features available in v10. Tell us your thoughts and report any issues you discover.

TYPO3 can be installed in various ways. For example, install the traditional way by using the source package at get.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/10.

To learn more about the new features, changes and improvements of TYPO3 version 10.2, have a look at the TYPO3 What’s New Slides or the detailed technical changelog.

The next release on our road to the LTS version of TYPO3 v10 will be version 10.3, currently scheduled to be released in February 2020. As pointed out earlier, this will be the feature freeze release of the v10 branch. You can find the release agenda in the TYPO3 Roadmap.

Until then, we would like to encourage you to check out TYPO3 version 10.2, embrace the new features and improvements, share your thoughts and report issues. There are also some exciting development initiatives, where you can get involved to shape the future of TYPO3.