Rego’s Everyday Life

Import RSS feeds related with categories in TYPO3

This week I’ve been taking a look to a TYPO3 extension to import RSS feeds called Yet Another Feed Importer (yafi).

This extension works really nice, but I miss one feature. I’m going to import blog posts to a TYPO3 website and I’d like to keep the categories already associated with the original post also related with the news imported in the website.

An example:

• Import one post that has the categories TYPO3 and PHP in the RSS
• If you have defined in your website the category TYPO3
• Then the tt_news record imported will be related with TYPO3 category

Finally, I’ve implemented it, you can find a patch at TYPO3 Forge. Also some little bugfixes for yafi extension.

This together with gl_pages_cat could help to feed your website automatically showing only related news on every categorized page.

PD: An inspirational post by Federico Mena today:

[...] If you don’t “git push” today, your day was a waste of time.

Forums in TYPO3

As part of the Mancomún project we need to use a forum with the next features:

• Anonymous users
• Captcha prevention
• RSS
• BBCode

So I’ve been testing different TYPO3 extensions:

• mm_forum: The most used and with community and recent activity. Only one problem not logged users can’t write posts.
• chc_forum: Not updated since 2006. Without Captcha prevention. RSS feed is added with another extension.
• wec_discussion: An active extension, but with a forum system quite simple and without BBCode support.

All of them miss some of the required features. After some tests I decided to use chc_forum, mainly because we’ve already used it in a previous project and another extension already provides Captcha prevention, but it’s not working properly.

I’d prefer to use mm_forum but it was more difficult to add the missed feature. I’ve added a new issue and I hope that this feature will be implemented in order to improve this great extension.

Finally, the result is:

• A new TYPO3 extension chc_forum_captcha, based on chc_forum_popup source code, that adds Captcha prevention to chc_forum.
• A little patch for chc_forum_feed, because it was not detecting the website protocol (HTTP or HTTPS).

gl_pages_cat: Pages categorization in TYPO3

gl_pages_cat is a TYPO3 extension that allows to relate TYPO3 pages with categories from tt_news_cat table. In that way, you’ll only have a category tree common for the whole website, pages and news are going to share the same categories.

At the beginning this extension just provided a method that returns the news related with the categories of the current page. It was enough for me, because of I was doing news lists from Formidable.

But now, it also provides a new method that returns the categories of the current page. With this method, for example, you can assign some categories to a page and, then, configure properly tt_news plugins to show only news related with the categories of that page. You could do something like that with the next TypoScript code:

includeLibs.user_pages_cat = EXT:gl_pages_cat/class.tx_glpagescat_div.php

lib.page.category = USER
lib.page.category.preUserFunc = tx_glpagescat_div->getPageCategories

plugin.tt_news.categorySelection < lib.page.category
plugin.tt_news.categoryMode = 1

I'm very grateful to Daniel Huf for having tested my extension and having given me his feedback (this TypoScript configuration). Thanks to this, the extension has improved and, from my point of view, now it's very useful combined with tt_news plugins.

For example, if you have a categorized TYPO3 website, once you have everything configured properly, you could change the news displayed on a page simply by changing the categories of the page.

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.

T3CON08: Last Day

Yesterday was the last day of the conference and after the party the day before people were quite tired.

I decided to go to the next talks:

• Hitchhiker’s Guide to TYPO3 v5: This was a talk to summarize the work done during the last year on FLOW3 and TYPO3 v5 projects. There were some things repeated from the tutorial and he mainly talked about persistence and REST services, every operation that could be done in TYPO3 backend will use web services. A good presentation with videos and so on, I liked it.
• Continuous Integration for FLOW3: A good talk about Continuous Integration in TYPO3, it works really nice perfectly integrated on TYPO3 forge running all tests in 3 platforms (Mac, Linux and Windows). It uses Hudson, and he explained about how to use it for particular projects.
• Intelligent web forms: As a Formidable collaborator I can miss the only talk about forms in the conference. They talked about the extension FormMaker that allows to manage forms from backend. Something interesting is that it allows to define some steps in a form, dividing it in several pages defining a workflow; they manage it with sessions and it has a drawback because you couldn’t have two forms with different data in two browser tabs. It seems a very powerful extension, maybe quite complex in the beginning but I should test it to give my opinion about it.
• Transparent Object Persistence with FLOW3: Karsten started talking about DDD (Domain Driven Design) and explain the different concepts of that approach: repository, aggregate, entity and value. This is the base of FLOW3 persistence framework that defines a Content Repository in which objects are stored automatically. A good point of this repository is that you can mount a relation data base and use it as an object with the API of the repository. There is a tool called TYPO3 CR Admin quite useful to see the stored date.

Finally I didn’t attend to the Best paper award event because the “Spanish” people (Nivel Siete, ICTI and Igalia people) went for a walk to get an overview of Berlin. We took the underground till Alexander Platz and we returned walking to the hotel seeing a lot of monuments.

In this TYPO3 conference I tried to catch as much information as possible about FLOW3 and TYPO3 v5 and these talks refreshing my concepts about Software Engineering (AOP, DDD, TDD, …). Furthermore they recommend a lot of books about Software Engineering you can see the further reading section at FLOW3 website. My conclusion about these projects could be that there’re a lot of things to do and one of them is improve the performance, if they get it FLOW3 will be a great framework and TYPO3 will have a great source code.

Congratulations to the organization of this great conference and also to Igalia for let me live that great experience.

T3CON08: Second Day

This are my feelings the second day of the T3CON08 (October 10th Friday), actually it was the first conference day, because the previous day there were only tutorials.

The day started with the Keynote by Kasper, it was shorter than I expected but quite amusing. The next year will be a TYPO3 Conference in Dallas (USA) but it should not replace to the conference in Europe, it means that TYPO3 community is growing and it’s good.

After the Keynote I went to the next talks:

• DEV3 – TYPO3 Enterprise Development: DEV3 is an Eclipse plugin to work with TYPO3 4, FLOW3 and TYPO3 5. It has a TeplateView that allows to users to modify TypoScript from Eclipse, users can edit constants and setup sections, moreover it has syntax highlighting, syntax checking, auto-completion, … for TYPO3, FLOW3 and TypoScript (mental note: “I have to test this plugin”).
• CSC2: Bringing CSS Styled Content to the next level: This was a talk about CSS, but it was very general and I don’t like it so much, maybe because I don’t usually have to fight with CSS or because I already knew the most of the things that she said.
• OpenEMM – Sending out Newsletters with TYPO3: An extension to send newsletters that integrates OpenEMM into TYPO3 backend. For that extension you need OpenEMM, an open source Java application, and it doesn’t provide anything special compared with TC Directmail (tc_directmail), so if tc_directmail doesn’t fits your requirements maybe this new extension could do it.
• Business Case – Marketing Open Source Software: Another quite general talk about marketing in open source companies, he recommended a book “The Cluetrain Manifesto” and talk about that in open source companies there’re 4 C’s, the common 3 C’s of marketing (Corporation, Customers and Competitors) and Community.
• Touchless Security with FLOW3: An explanation about how the security framework works in FLOW3. It uses AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming) to can intercept every method that is going to be executed and through ACLs (Access Control Lists) the framework allows or denies the execution of any method. The most important here is that you don’t have to take care about security in your code, only have to define a concrete ACL and never modify your code.
• Test Driven Development using FLOW3: He explained the concept of Test Driven Development in which you have to write tests for all your code and before write your code, in that way you define the APIs before write it. FLOW3 has a Testing package based on PHPUnit that make easy write unit tests. I think that it’s a very interesting idea about how to develop an application. Karsten also talked about Test Driven Design, because some time you are doing design while you write your tests.

That day was a long day because of the conference dinner and the party after that. Not a very good day talking about the talks but a good social day.

T3CON08: First Day

Hello from Berlin .

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 .

gl_transstat: translate pages and records in an easy way on TYPO3

gl_transstat is a great TYPO3 extension developed by my workmate Diego that allows create translations of pages and records on TYPO3 very easily and keep track of translation status of them.

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

FORMidable: Starting Collaboration

This week I’ve started my collaboration with FORMidable, a TYPO3 extension.

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.

O Galego en TYPO3 III

TYPO3 4.2 foi lanzado onte, o que implica que o galego xa está soportado no core de TYPO3.

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.