Rego’s Everyday Life

Latest TYPO3 stuff

Lately I’ve been quite busy (I’m doing a Master on Free Software) and I didn’t have time to write any post, actually I missed the chance to do it sometimes. So, before the year ends, I should write my last post and here it goes.

This month I’ve published 2 new TYPO3 extensions:

• Pages categorization: It adds the possibility to relate pages with tt_news categories. This is very useful in some cases, because of you can have a plugin that shows news in pages with different categories, and the list of news will be different on each page. This extension also provides a function to get the news with the same categories than the current page.
• Accessible Ratings: This extension provides a plugin, which makes that Ratings extension works without JavaScript.

On the other hand, I found a page with the Formidable reference, it’s not complete but it’s updated to the last version. Furthermore, I’ve done some contributions to Formidable extension between November and December:

• Improved the datasource:DB: Now it has new properties fields, table and wheres. Whit this change is very easy to define queries from the XML.
• Added a new property meta/formwrap: It removes the HTML form tag when you use Formidable just to show information (lists, detail, …)
• New wizard icons for Formidable plugins.

All of this things come from my work in the Mancomún project, a TYPO3 project that we’re doing right now. You can check the current status of the project at SVN repository.

By the way, I’ve been testing DocBook and I like it to make slides, I should play more with it in the future.

How to write a manual for a GNOME application with DocBook

This is the title of my work for Introduction to Libre Software at Master on Free Software. You can read the article here or in only one page or in PDF format (generated with dblatex). Furthermore you can download the source file or check the SVN repository (where you can find the works of my classmates).

For your information, I paste here the abstract of my article, if you like to do any comment about the article feedback will be welcomed :

This article is a guide about how to write help manuals for GNOME applications using DocBook as standard tool. This manual explains the right way to add a tutorial on a GNOME project, as well as the process to translate it. The integration process to add a new option in application menu that shows the help manual, is also explained in this article.

Writing this article I’ve had my first contact with DocBook, from my point of view I’d only use it if you want a good HTML output for your document, however if you prefer a good PDF I’d use LaTeX. For example, you can open any DocBook document directly with Yelp and you can see that the result is very good:
yelp ghelp:/path/to/myfile.xml

Moreover, I’ve used DocBook to create some slides to do a presentation of my article (source ifle) in class and I like it a lot it’s very customizable with a good XSL and CSS. For example, I found some stylesheets that generates a good HTML for presentations. When I have some free time I’m sure that I’m going to play with DocBook slides.