TER: New requirement for extension upload

The TYPO3 Extension Repository (TER) is the central place to download and publish plugins and modules for TYPO3. Since TYPO3 3.5 (2003), the well known Extension Manager lets you quickly search and install extensions to enhance your website with news, photo galleries, forms, ... After about 10 years, more than 5800 extensions have been created and made publicly available to the community. However, since the release of TYPO3 4.6 in October 2011, long deprecated methods and calls in the TYPO3 API have been removed, starting to really "break" extensions that were not maintained anymore. With a strategy to announce changes in the API, and keep a compatibility layer for 2 versions on one hand and a 6-month release cycle on the other hand, an extension that has not been updated for 1 year is likely to be not fully compatible anymore. As announced at the beginning of this year, a cleanup process has started and the first step is to help users find extensions compatible with their TYPO3 website.

Implications for extension authors

Every extension is now required to define a dependency for TYPO3. If you try to upload an extension without a dependency for TYPO3 or with a dependency which is outside the range of currently supported TYPO3 versions, your upload will be rejected and an error message will be shown. Simply add to ext_emconf.php a dependency for the version(s) you tested the extension with:

  'constraints' => array(
    'depends' => array(
      'typo3' => '4.5.0-4.7.99',
    ),
  ),

Note: You can set the minimum for a version of TYPO3 which is not supported anymore, but then the maximum must be within the supported range. You cannot set a maximum outside the range of supported versions. Currently and until the release of TYPO3 6.2 beta1 — that is, "feature freeze" — in September this year, the upper bound of allowed range is 6.1.99.

Recent Uploads on TER

As you can see with recent uploads of extensions, this hard check is not yet effective. Nevertheless, the second step after refusing uploads without a proper dependency for TYPO3, in the coming days, will be to mark existing extensions without such dependency as "outdated".

More information

The Extension Coordination Team [1] handles this operation. See [2] for the wiki information. Feel free to use the mailing lists to ask questions and discuss the procedures. [1] <link http: forge.typo3.org projects team-ect _blank>forge.typo3.org/projects/team-ect
[2] <link http: forge.typo3.org projects team-ect wiki ter_clean-up _blank>forge.typo3.org/projects/team-ect/wiki/TER_Clean-up