TYPO3 4.1 Beta 1

So what's new? Inline Relational Record Editing (IRRE) After a long developing and reviewing phase, <link>Oliver Hader's diploma thesis project called <link http: wiki.typo3.org index.php inline_relational_record_editing>Inline Relational Record Editing (IRRE) has finally entered the core! The functionality IRRE provides is groundbreaking for the relational editing capabilities of the Core. Its main feature is as simple as editing sub-records inside the parent record, and being able to add new sub-records just by clicking a "+" icon, which then loads the form for the sub-record into the main form.
Examples of 1:n relationships for which IRRE comes in handy reach from "products" that have multiple "prices" to "persons" that have many "email-addresses". The following screen shows a hotel record having multiple offers, which again have multiple prices.
Inserting, deleting and sorting of sub-records can be done without any reloads as it's all done with AJAX. However, IRRE doesn't only offer to manage those sub-record relationships (1:n relations), but can also be used to manage m:m relations (with or without attributes) by treating the records of the mm-table itself as exactly the same kind of sub-record table mentioned above, with the slight addition of a uniqueness-check. Here's an example of how an MM relation with attributes between "persons" and "companies" can be managed using IRRE. All in all, IRRE bridges the gap between the repetitive elements capabilities of Flexforms and the old relation field types of tceforms by saving what Flexforms saves in one big XML field into nice separate database records with a 1:n relationship. Thank you very much for this great contribution, Oliver!
UTF-8 for filenames On the road to a fully UTF-8 enabled Core, Martin Kutschker has written a patch that makes it possible to have filenames in (nearly) all UTF-8 characters. To enable the feature, just enter the install tool and set the option "forceCharset" to "utf-8" and enable the "UTF8filesystem" checkbox. Here's an example of filenames now possible with UTF8filesystem enabled:
Backend "Who is online"
The Tools->Useradmin module now shows which Backend users are currently online! Wouldn't it be great if this feature could be extended so you can click on one of the users and start a chat with the person? Anybody interested?
Frontend "Stay logged in"
TYPO3's Frontend login functionality now offers users the choice to "stay logged in" for a configurable time instead of only during one session. Until now this was only possible using extensions like sg_feautologin by Stefan Geith. To configure the new permanent login functionality for TYPO3 4.1, simply install the latest version of the newloginbox extension and adjust the options "permalogin" and cookie "lifetime" in the install tool to suit your needs.
Bidirectional MM relations Apart from IRRE, there is even more new stuff in 4.1 to how database relations can be managed in TYPO3: Bidirectional MM relations! The clue about bidirectional MM relations is that you can look at a relation from both sides of it. For example the employment relation between a company and a person table could be looked at from the company as well as the person side. Looking at the relation from the company side: Looking at the same relation from the person side:
Next steps to 4.1
Please test this Beta as much as possible, especially the new features described above! During the next weeks, we will release two to three more Betas, and make the feature freeze mid to end of December, which means the final version is expected to be out around New Year's Eve. For a detailed overview of the features planned for 4.1 and their progress, have a look at the <link http: wiki.typo3.org index.php>4.1 Development wiki page.
Download and MD5 sums TYPO3 4.1 Beta 1a can be downloaded from the <link http: typo3.org download packages>download section on TYPO3.org. Warning: Beta 1 contained a parse error on PHP4  which has been fixed in Beta 1a.
Have fun testing! cheers
Ingmar