TYPO3 CMS 7.2 - Focus on the Frontend

Categories: Development Created by Benni Mack
For the next iteration on the way to TYPO3 CMS 7 LTS, which is named 7.2 and planned to be released on April 28th, 2015, the focus is on the frontend side of the TYPO3 system. Frontend, however, can mean a lot of areas. These are the areas were are going to touch

Admin Panel & Frontend Editing

Administration on the frontend side, and simple frontend editing are tightly coupled - they have been neglected far too long. We plan on decoupling the components and then improve especially the usability in these areas while keeping the base principle of the existing logic. This is also the foundation for a continuous improvement effort of these areas in future releases.

Content Types & Content Rendering

The default content types available in the system will be redefined and optimized - lots of passion has been done by the User Experience Week 2014 attendees. "Text w/ Image" will be migrated to "Text w/ Media" and the output configuration should be easier than the existing TypoScript configuration of CSS Styled Content. The contributors are working on providing a good toolset for easier ways of creating custom  

Fluid Improvements

The FLUIDTEMPLATE Rendering possibility has seen a lot of great additions within the community. The most common parts should be the base of every installation, which will be integrated into the TYPO3 CMS system. A proper set of additional ViewHelpers for the frontend usage, and some backports from the Fluid upstream package will round up the work in this area.

Routing

Most people agree on this: The TYPO3 Core should handle routing a.k.a. "Speaking URLs" out-of-the-box. There should also be a way to handle special configurations that are possible with common extensions like RealURL or CoolURI. There are some rough sketches of a routing concept but also an an approach to include RealURL as system extension, which is then always working with the TYPO3 Core.

Performance Optimizations

Optimizing the Frontend output and simplify AJAX calls to optimize the responsiveness of the system will make 7.2 faster than 6.2 and 4.5 when it comes to non-cached pages!

Frontend Login & Indexed Search

The system extension "felogin" is going to be rewritten with Extbase + Fluid while keeping the existing logic exactly the same. The extension "indexed_search" has been shipping an additional Extbase plugin for quite some time, now we need to streamline the plugin and make sure it is a stable successor to the previous pi-based plugin.

TypoScript Best Practices

When it comes to TypoScript, the past years have shown what are best practices in regard to language handling and configuration for typical sites. We aim to streamline the options in order to have as much as possible "configured the right way" so most installations won't have a lot of options to set for a typical HTML5 website.

More goodies on their way

We plan on adding a nice feature for cropping images in the Backend that are rendered with the already common cropping usage. Keep up to date with the latest development on <link http: review.typo3.org>review.typo3.org, feel free to contact <link>Mathias Schreiber or me to contribute to the upcoming version.