I’m in the TYPO3 Conference, today I’ve attended two tutorials: development with FLOW3 and a workshop for creating TYPO3 websites.

Robert Lemke was the author of the first tutorial, it showed a mixing of his podcasts about FLOW3. The great new was that there is already implemented a complete blog system like buzz.typo3.org with FLOW3 using the content repository as persistence mechanism (quite interesting see that actually some stuff works). However the main problem is still performance (Robert said that it shouldn’t be difficult to fix) but the development context is currently very slow. Some brief comments about this tutorial:

• Classes define actions, methods that are going to be called from outside.
• All objects are single instantiations (Singleton Pattern) if you don’t mark them as prototype.
• If you depends on another class you should use Dependency Injection defining a method that is going to be called automatically when the class is instantiated.
• He gave an overview about Domain Driven Design, in a roughly way we can talk about 3 concepts: entities (objects), values (immutable objects) and aggregates (entities that are going to be searched).
• Talking about persistence we need a repository for each aggregate, if we extend the basic repository we’ll have common methods to add, remove, find, … (other entities will be stored transparently). The content repository need that the type of class attributes is specified through comments.
• Finally he talked about REST services, and all repositories are going to be services that will be called automatically to the concrete method depending if there is or not some GET parameter or if there is some POST parameter.

The second tutorial was a workshop from jweiland.net, they gave some useful receipts that can be applied in any TYPO3 projects. They talked about a tool to clean TYPO3 installations, it seems very useful because in big projects usually you don’t know how file you need or not in your filesystem, they don’t say the name of the tool but I can guess that it’s the cli_dispatch.phpsh script (more info) I have to test it!. Other comments:

• Use UTF-8 for the database from the beginning (it’s always good to remember).
• For TypoScript they recommend to create a library in a system folder that could be used in other projects (exporting/importing), these TypoScript templates will be used with Basic Templates and defining constants.
• Moreover it’s possible to detect syntax errors in TypoScript using the Object Browser and the Template Analyzer.

I’ve enjoyed this first day so I’m going to rest to be prepared for tomorrow.

PS: I’ve met some people from Colombia (Nivel Siete) and we’ve been talking Spanish in Berlin .

If you want to use this new feature you’ll need an account at Box.net, a web service that allows users to store files online, and set this account at MyTime preferences.

Moreover MyTime 0.2 is integrated with Online Desktop because it’s using the Online Desktop account system to store the Box.net account. We’ve developed a library (libmytime-common) that has the responsibility to manage the account data depending on if there’s an Online Desktop session, when it uses the Online Desktop account system, or not, then it uses the GNOME Keyring.

Feel free to test this new release, we’ll be glad if you give us your feedback.

PS: MyTime is on Softpedia.

You can download the Debian packages to test it, any comment or suggestion will be welcomed.

In future releases we’re going to add support to store information recorded by MyTime on a Web Service, in order to can query this information from any computer. Moreover we’ll try to use Online Desktop to store the data needed to login at Web Service.

You can read more information about this project at MyTime home page and return your feedback using different resources (mailing lists, forums, tracker, …) at SourceForge.net page.

We hope you enjoy this application and find it useful .

PS: MyTime is now translated to Spanish and Galician.

This extension is very useful for multilanguage websites improving work efficiency in tasks related with internationalization and localization.

Last days I’ve been working on this extension, and I’ve done some changes to add new features that make this extension more powerful. The main modifications are:

• Added the possibility to create translations for more than one page or record at the same time.
• Support to translate records of any table.
• Use generic configuration variables.

You can download the last release 1.2.2 directly from TER or if you like you can download the source code from the SVN repository:
svn checkout https://forxa.mancomun.org/svn/gltransstat

Moreover in the following phases we’re going to try to integrate this project with Online Desktop trying to store information about application use remotely so that you can query information about your time everywhere.

The project is been developed by some people from Igalia engineering group: Antonio, Diego, Quique, Iván, Chema, Loren, Xavi and me.

Among other technologies MyTime uses:

• GTK+ and Glade for the graphical interface.
• GObject for data server and model logic implementation.
• D-Bus usage for communication between components.
• SQLite database system for local data management.

You can read more information about the project in its home page at Igalia community. Furthermore the project has its own page at SourceForge.net where you can find mailing lists, forums, and SVN repository of the project.

There’re a lot of things todo, however feel free to test MyTime and give us your feedback, we’ll be very happy.

We’ll keep you informed of news in this project.

If you develop TYPO3 extensions, specially frontend forms, you should test the extension called Ameos FORMidable (ameos_formidable), with this extension you can develop TYPO3 extensions very fast. After more than one year developing TYPO3 applications, I think that FORMidable is an essential TYPO3 extension; I’ve fallen in love with it.

Furthermore FORMidable actually is a free software project, at project’s homepage there’re links to documentation, SVN, a lot of examples, and mailing list. In this list you can ask, suggest, send patches, etc. and somebody from FORMidable community is going to try to help you, besides FORMidable authors accept patches to improve FORMidable or fix some bugs; I’ve sent several patches and they’ve added my modifications to project.

This post has only the purpose to announce that I’ve published my first article at FORMidable web page.

Finally I’d like to thank to FORMidable development team, specially to Jerome Schneider, for give me the opportunity to collaborate in this great project and for accept my ideas and patches trying to improve FORMidable.

I’ve followed the instructions from OnlineDesktop/Jhbuild, but with these instructions you need to compile 101 modules, it’s quite slow, moreover you can find some problems in different modules that aren’t stables. I need to upgrade to Hardy Heron 8.04 to can finish my compilation.

However, thanks to Dape, I’ve found another solution to test Online Desktop faster only compiling 6 modules: hippo-canvas, local-export-daemon, desktop-data-model, online-desktop, bigboard and mugshot-client.
Maybe this isn’t the best way to test Online Desktop, but it’s very quickly for a simple test.

Next I’m going to relate instructions needed to test Online Desktop on an Ubuntu Hardy Heron distribution.

First at all I have to say you that you should use a new user to compile Online Desktop. I usually use sux when I’m compiling:

sux - newuser


Furthermore we should install dependencies before start to compile to avoid future problems. Dependencies from Ubuntu Jhbuild dependencies:

sudo apt-get install gnome-common build-essential doxygen subversion automake1.4 automake1.7 automake1.8 cvs git-core docbook docbook-utils docbook-xsl flex bison texinfo python2.5-dev lynx mono-gmcs libtiff4-dev libxtst-dev libgdbm-dev libxml-simple-perl libelfg0-dev libcupsys2-dev libldap2-dev libexchange-storage1.2-dev libxmu-dev libpam0g-dev libgpgme11-dev libfreetype6-dev libpng12-dev libxrender-dev libxi-dev libexpat1-dev libbz2-dev firefox-dev libxcursor-dev guile-1.8-dev libxdamage-dev libxcomposite-dev libmono-cairo2.0-cil xnest libxft-dev libloudmouth1-0 libloudmouth1-dev libxss-dev libxkbfile-dev libjasper-dev libnl-dev ppp-dev libdv4-dev uuid-dev libpcre3-dev libsqlite3-dev libpurple-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev xulrunner-1.9-dev gtk-doc-tools libgnome-desktop-dev automake

And some new packages, because we’re going to compile a few modules and need some packages:

sudo apt-get install python-cairo-dev python-gtk2-dev libhippocanvas-dev python-hippocanvas libgtk2.0-dev python-gtk2-dev libpanelappletmm-2.6-dev libpanel-applet2-dev libsoup2.4-dev python-gnome2-dev libcroco3-dev


Firstly you need to install Jhbuild, I paste here instructions from OnlineDesktop/Jhbuild. First create a folder od and the structure needed:

mkdir ~/od
cd ~/od
mkdir checkout
mkdir install
mkdir -p install/var/lib/dbus
ln -s /var/lib/dbus/machine-id install/var/lib/dbus


Now get and install Jhbuild:

cd ~/od
svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/jhbuild/trunk jhbuild
cd jhbuild
./autogen.sh ; make ; make install


At this moment we need a file ~/.jhbuildrc with the next content:

# -*- mode: python -*-

# if you have a GNOME svn account, uncomment this line
#repos['svn.gnome.org'] = 'svn+ssh://user@svn.gnome.org/svn/'

moduleset = 'online-desktop'

modules = [ 'meta-online-desktop' ]

# This will take a long time, and conflicts with the jhbuild cairo
skip = ['mozilla']

# what directory should the source be checked out to?
checkoutroot = os.path.expanduser('~/od/checkout')

# the prefix to configure/install modules to (must have write access)
prefix = os.path.expanduser('~/od/install')

# Use system libraries for the builds
addpath('PKG_CONFIG_PATH', os.path.join(os.sep, 'usr', 'lib', 'pkgconfig'))
addpath('PKG_CONFIG_PATH', os.path.join(os.sep, 'usr', 'share', 'pkgconfig'))

# Look in /usr/share for icons, D-BUS service files, etc
addpath('XDG_DATA_DIRS', '/usr/share')
# Look in /etc/xdg for system-global autostart files
addpath('XDG_CONFIG_DIRS', '/etc/xdg')

# We need to add the gtk-2.0 directory explicitly to the Python path since '.pth'
# files (here pygtk.pth) only work properly in system directories
import re, sys
python_version = sys.version.split()[0]
python_version = re.sub(r"^(d+.d+).d+$", r"1", python_version)
lib_packages = os.path.join(prefix, 'lib', 'python' + python_version, 'site-packages')
lib64_packages = os.path.join(prefix, 'lib64', 'python' + python_version, 'site-packages')
if lib64_packages in sys.path:
    addpath('PYTHONPATH', os.path.join(lib64_packages, 'gtk-2.0'))
else:
    addpath('PYTHONPATH', os.path.join(lib_packages, 'gtk-2.0'))

# Rebuild faster
os.environ['INSTALL'] = os.path.expanduser('~/bin/install-check')

# Use the standard system bus
os.environ['DBUS_SYSTEM_BUS_ADDRESS'] = 'unix:path=/var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket'

os.environ['UNDER_JHBUILD'] = 'true'

# Flags needed to 'pyorbit'
os.environ['CFLAGS'] = '-lz'

# Params for mugshot-client
module_autogenargs['mugshot-client'] = autogenargs + ' --with-gecko-sdk=/usr/lib/xulrunner/sdk/ --with-gecko-idl=/usr/lib/xulrunner/sdk/idl/'

You have to check which jhbuild you’re going to execute, you have to use ~/bin/jhbuild.

Before to compile the modules we need to do:

jhbuild -m bootstrap buildone waf


Then we are going to compile these few modules:

jhbuild buildone -a hippo-canvas local-export-daemon desktop-data-model online-desktop bigboard mugshot-client


To test an Online Desktop session we have to create a file /usr/local/bin/run-online-desktop with the next content:

if [ -x $HOME/bin/jhbuild ] ; then
   exec $HOME/bin/jhbuild run dbus-launch --exit-with-session od-session
else
   zenity --error --text="No JHBuild session found for user $USER"
   exit 1
fi

And make it executable:

chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/run-online-desktop


Now we have to create another file /usr/share/gdm/BuiltInSessions/online-desktop-jhbuild.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Online Desktop (JHBuild)
Comment=JHBuild of Online Desktop
Exec=/usr/local/bin/run-online-desktop
Icon=
Type=Application

Finally we can start a new session with the user that we’ve compiled Online Desktop and test it (maybe when you start an Online Desktop session at first time you have to close and restart the GNOME session to see that Big Board knows that you are logged in Online Desktop).

I hope these instructions are complete, but if you find any problem or error please tell me and I’ll update this post. Moreover you can find some solutions for your problems at Jhbuild Issues.

Dende este momento calquera que se descargue a versión actual de TYPO3 poderá ter un sitio web funcionando en galego coma un idioma máis.

Se queremos ter o backend de TYPO3 en galego tan só temos que seguir os seguintes pasos:

• Acceder ó módulo Ext Manager (Adm. de Extensións)
• Seleccionar a opción Translation handling
• Seleccionar o idioma Galician - [Galician]
• Premer en Save selection
• Premer en Update from repository

Unha vez feito isto poderíamos escoller o galego como idioma de backend:

• Ir ó módulo User settings (Configuración)
• Seleccionar Galcian - [Galician] no campo Language (Lingua)
• Premer en Save configuration (Gardar configuración)

Ademáis está dispoñible a extensión Static Info Tables (gl) - static_info_tables_gl, que proporciona a tradución ó galego das táboas estáticas de TYPO3.

Para rematar quero lembrar que, como xa sabedes, o galego ten unha conta no servidor de traducións de TYPO3, polo que calquera colaboración para seguir coa tradución de TYPO3 ó galego será benvida.

Since this moment everyone that download TYPO3 current version may have a website working in Galician as a language more.

If we want to have TYPO3 backend in Galician just have to follow next steps:

• Access to Ext Manager module
• Select option Translation handling
• Select language Galician - [Galician]
• Click on Save selection
• Click on Update from repository

Then we may choose select Galician as backend language:

• Go to User settings module
• Select Galcian - [Galician] on field Language
• Click on Save configuration

Moreover it’s available the extension Static Info Tables (gl) - static_info_tables_gl, that provides Galician translation for TYPO3 static tables.

Finally I’d like to remerber that, as you know, Galician language has an account at TYPO3 translation server, so that any collaboration to follow with TYPO3 translation to Galician will be welcome.

There is different ways to configure a TYPO3 extension (from more general to more concrete), and I’m going to explain how to use them:

• 1. Generic Variables (ext_conf_template.txt)
• 2. TYPO3_CONF_VARS
• 3. Plugin Configuration
  • a) TypoScript
  • b) FlexForms

1. Generic Variables (ext_conf_template.txt)

For extension configuration variables we can use the file ext_conf_template.txt file, variables stored here are common to whole extension. Plugins, modules and classes can read these configuration variables.

For example, if in one extension you have a database table we usually use an extension configuration variable to save PID for the records of this table. The file ext_conf_template.txt would be (see more):

# cat=basic/int; type=int; label=Parent page uid (PID) for records of myTable
myTablePID = 0

And you can read this information in your source code with:

$confArray = unserialize($GLOBALS[‘TYPO3_CONF_VARS’][‘EXT’][‘extConf’][your-extension-key]);

echo $confArray[‘myTablePID’];

2. TYPO3_CONF_VARS

We can use TYPO3_CONF_VARS array to store extension configuration variables too. We set these variables directly at file ext_localconf.php:

$TYPO3_CONF_VARS[‘EXTCONF’][$_EXTKEY][‘myVariable’] = ‘myValue’;

And we’d can read these variables where we want. Moreover these variables could be modified from ext_localconf.php files of other extensions loaded later than our extension.

3. Plugins Configuration

TYPO3 has two more ways to configure plugins (frontend applications developed in a extension):

a) TypoScript

We can use directly TypoScript inside a template Setup on module Template. With a simple TypoScript code:

plugin.tx_myextension_pi1.myVar = value

We can set a value for the variable myVar that we are going to receive in our plugin as the second parameter of main method.

b) FlexForms

In addition we use FlexForms in order to add specific configuration to frontend plugins. And we usually defines a sheet to override extension configuration. The basic FlexForm for our plugins are something like this (see more):

<T3DataStructure>
   <meta>
      <langDisable>1</langDisable>

   </meta>
   <sheets>
      <sOverride>
         <ROOT>
            <TCEforms>
               <sheetTitle>Override Extension Configuration</sheetTitle>

            </TCEforms>
            <type>array</type>
            <el>
               <myTablePID>
                  <TCEforms>

                     <label>PID for myTable records</label>
                     <config>
                        <type>group</type>
                        <internal_type>db</internal_type>

                        <allowed>pages</allowed>
                        <size>1</size>
                        <maxitems>1</maxitems>
                        <minitems>0</minitems>

                        <show_thumbs>1</show_thumbs>
                     </config>
                  </TCEforms>
               </myTablePID>
            </el>

         </ROOT>
      </sOverride>
   </sheets>
</T3DataStructure>

And to read this variables we use:

$this->pi_initPIflexForm();
$this->pi_getFFvalue($this->cObj->data[‘pi_flexform’], ‘myTablePID’);

Init function

Finally we’ve developed a function init to use in every plugin that we develop, this function reads all configuration variables and stores its in an array $this->conf. Next the source code of this function:

   /**
    * Init Function: here all the needed configuration values are stored in class variables

    *
    * @param    array   $conf: configuration array from TS
    * @return   void

    */
   function init($conf) {
      $this->conf = $conf; // Store configuration

      $this->pi_setPiVarDefaults(); // Set default piVars from TS
      $this->pi_initPIflexForm(); // Init FlexForm configuration for plugin

      // Read extension configuration
      $extConf = unserialize($GLOBALS[‘TYPO3_CONF_VARS’][‘EXT’][‘extConf’][$this->extKey]);

      if (is_array($extConf)) {
         $conf = t3lib_div::array_merge($extConf, $conf);

      }

      // Read TYPO3_CONF_VARS configuration
      $varsConf = $GLOBALS[‘TYPO3_CONF_VARS’][‘EXTCONF’][$this->extKey];

      if (is_array($varsConf)) {

         $conf = t3lib_div::array_merge($varsConf, $conf);

      }

      // Read FlexForm configuration
      if ($this->cObj->data[‘pi_flexform’][‘data’]) {

         foreach ($this->cObj->data[‘pi_flexform’][‘data’] as $sheetName => $sheet) {

            foreach ($sheet as $langName => $lang) {
               foreach(array_keys($lang) as $key) {

                  $flexFormConf[$key] = $this->pi_getFFvalue($this->cObj->data[‘pi_flexform’], 
                                                             $key, $sheetName, $langName);

                  if (!$flexFormConf[$key]) {
                     unset($flexFormConf[$key]);

                  }
               }
            }
         }
      }

      if (is_array($flexFormConf)) {

         $conf = t3lib_div::array_merge($conf, $flexFormConf);
      }

      $this->conf = $conf;

   }

I think that this function can be very useful when you develop a TYPO3 extension.