This Month in TYPO3 - March 2020 - Issue #15

March was marked by the worldwide spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless the work on TYPO3 v10 LTS continued and some of the planned events took place online.

Curated by Peter Kraume

TYPO3 Core

With a huge effort and activity of hundreds of contributors, more than 230 bug fixes and improvements have been added to TYPO3 v9.5.15 since the last maintenance release in February 2020. This release also marks the last official public release of TYPO3 v8 LTS. Read more

In his tutorial “Get a Local TYPO3 v10 Installation With No Effort” Peter Kraume explains how to set up the latest TYPO3 v10 dev version on your own computer with the help of a DDEV local development environment. If you want to give TYPO3 v10 a try but don’t want to mess up with your other development environments, this is a great way to go. Read more

TYPO3 Association and TYPO3 Company

Is your website still running on TYPO3 v8.7? Free community support has ended in March, so you need to make a decision. Either upgrade to a newer version, or order Extended Long Term Support (ELTS). This will ensure you continue to comply with laws relating to GDPR and security requirements. ELTS is also available for TYPO3 7.6. If you still run TYPO3 6.2 and need ELTS for this version, please get in touch with the TYPO3 GmbH. They’re currently evaluating if there is enough demand for another year of ELTS. Read more

Events

Instead of posting the regular 'Mark your Calendar' blog, we would like to inform you today about the planned TYPO3 events in 2020 against the background of the corona pandemic. Some events, such as the WEBcamp Venlo and the CertiFUNcation Day at Phantasialand, have already been postponed or canceled due to the corona situation. Read more

TYPO3 Ecosystem & Community

It takes a long time to write a book! The team at OSP are busy writing away the official TYPO3 Guidebook and although you may not have heard from them in a while, they’ve been working hard in the background. Read more

From March 13–15, 2020, the TYPO3 Server Team organized a combined team sprint for their quarterly real-life meeting at the office of Ops One in Zürich, Switzerland. After more than ten years, Michael Stucki is handing over the team leadership to Andri Steiner. Most of the work of the server team is carried out quietly in the background so this report gives a very good insight into the various technologies the server team manages. Read more

The TYPO3 Accessibility Initiative was reinitiated in June, 2019 by members of the TYPO3 community. They provide information on accessibility and give the opportunity to discuss accessibility topics on a regular basis in their Slack channel #cig-accessibility and the monthly TYPO3 Accessibility Hour. Read more

Since crowdfunding is a very successful way for products or projects to raise many small contributions from a larger community, Jo Hasenau shows in his article that it could even be a way to help overcome the current crisis. Read more

The Structured Content Initiative is the core Strategic Initiative focused on improving the content editing user experience in TYPO3 CMS. Read the last update to learn more about what the team has been working on. Read more

Sanjay Chauhan has compiled a list of exciting new features and enhancements for integrators in TYPO3 v10. Read more

Never hear this question from your content editors again, “Why can she do that, but I can't?” Solid planning early of backend user groups in your project can save you chaos and extra work later. There is a very close connection between the long-term success of your TYPO3-projects and the happiness of the editors working in the installations day in and day out. Well thought out backend user groups and a clear, well-structured backend experience are fundamental to your clients’ job satisfaction (and appreciation of your work!). In her blog post, Desirée Lochner shows you some principles on how to organize well-designed backend user groups that will make your job easier and that your editors will love. Read more

Documentation

A Fluid start page was created in “TYPO3 Explained.” This reflects the importance of Fluid in TYPO3 and the multiple ways it is now used in TYPO3. An “Introduction to Fluid” subpage was added as well. The Fluid page serves as an overview of various ways to use Fluid in TYPO3 as Fluid is now no longer used only in developing Extensions with Extbase & Fluid, as was the case when it was initially introduced. Read more

Development

In projects up to TYPO3 8, individual pages could be excluded from the URL generation, e.g. via RealUrl or CoolURI. This was especially exciting for list/detail views, if the contents or page properties of list/detail pages differed outside the plugin. With TYPO3 9LTS the URL routing concept has changed (much to the better!) and it is no longer possible to easily exclude single pages from the URL segment. A separate route enhancer solves this problem. Read more

Have you ever been asked to add functionality to your website that is not currently available in your CMS? Building middleware can be a useful approach in these cases. To give you an idea of what can be accomplished with a middleware, Daniel Goerz shares two use cases from customer projects at b13. These two examples provide you some inspiration and help you embrace all the new tools and possibilities that TYPO3 CMS brings to the table. Read more

Progressive Web Apps (PWA) have become popular because their benefits truly capture the imagination of business owners. Native-like browsing experience, SEO-friendliness, offline mode supported: PWAs are credited with improving conversion rates and boosting profits of brands. On the other hand, however, some businesses prioritize having a stable and secure environment for their platforms and thus choose to build upon reliable solutions like TYPO3. It’s an enterprise-grade CMS that’s flexible, yet secure, so it’s often the first choice for brands that opt for scalability. The people at Macopedia wanted to address and solve this dilemma. They ended up launching TYPO Headless & PWA, an opportunity to get the best of both worlds: a robust PWA based on a reliable CMS. 

In his tutorial on how to migrate a TYPO3 project to Composer mode Sigala Mbigha documents the necessary steps for a successful switch to Composer. Read more

Extensions

In TYPO3 you can not only link to pages but also to a specific content element on a page - often referred to as "anchors" or "jump links". The respective UID of the content element (e.g. #c123) serves as a URL fragment. This works fine but is not very meaningful. Especially if you want to share a certain text fragment with another person, a human-readable anchor would be desirable. The new extension "content_slug" is intended to help here. Read more

TYPO3 has hidden gems. One of them is the system extension feedit which adds frontend editing to TYPO3. It adds some options to the admin panel in TYPO3 frontend, and allows integrators to add more fine grained editing experiences right into the content. Daniel Siepmann’s post covers most of the provided features, with screenshots and how to configure the extension. Read more

So you've read so far ...
Did you like what you've just read? We’re very interested in your feedback on these posts. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below, including if you like it, or if you have suggestions on how to improve the This Month in TYPO3 series to make it more useful for you.
Furthermore, we’d like to encourage you to blog about TYPO3, whether it is about your editor experience or discoveries as a TYPO3 developer. Each and every article is valuable for the TYPO3 community! If you want to submit a suggestion, please fill in this form.

Contributors:
We would like to thank the following contributors (in no particular order) for taking the time to write articles:
Julian Böhm, Marco Tiel, Felicity Brand, Michael Stucki, Jo Hasenau, Michael Telgkamp, Rachel Foucard, Sanjay Chauhan, Desirée Lochner, Marc Willmann, Daniel Goerz, Adam Marcinkowski, Łukasz Uznański, Sigala Mbigha, Sebastian Klein, Daniel Siepmann, Benni Mack
Content curation: Peter Kraume
Proofreading: Tony Lush