[Typo3-dev] This functionality was not meant to do that

[Stephane Schitter]

Hello,

Recently there were discussions about how to allow people to learn Typo3 easier.
Someone mentioned that Typo3 is able to do things in various different ways, and
this is all very good.

This means that to achieve their goal, people will try combine or use various
Typo3 functionalities, and as in Typo3 we can do things in different ways, this
will lead to a large number of combinations to reach the goal (and I think this
wide path open in front of people is scaring many of them).

Then Kasper mentioned that we will not reduce the number of ways Typo3 has to do
things, otherwise it wouldn't be Typo3 anymore. The idea of writing a
documentation or guidelines on the best way (amongst the choices offered) to do
things may sound appealing, but I think what we need is the opposite:

"This functionality was not meant to do that"

I said above that people will combine/use various functionalities of Typo3 to
reach their goal, but there are dead-ends ! Some things Typo3 allows you to do
will either never give you what you wanted, or will take too much effort to
reach it.

I think we must find ways to say that "this functionality" was never meant to
"do that". It's better to redirect people early in their choices, than to stop
them going in the wrong direction if they have gone already very far.

I can give you examples. I would for example need to know a few things:

- Is is possible to build an extension that includes a Templavoila page template
(with the DS and TO). I am not talking about flexforms, such as those seen in
newloginbox or tt_news, but rather full template with the HTML code, the
mapping, etc... I am trying to go in that direction, but I do not succeed, so
"were TemplaVoila templates meant to be included in an extension" ?

- Can TemplaVoila be used to build extensions such as the player_profile
tutorial, with custom fields in the backend and to display the results in the
frontend. So "was TemplaVoila meant to build 'data storage/display' extensions,
such as a book inventory, a movie inventory (as seen in tutorial), without any
PHP coding ?"

(if you have the answers to these two I would appreciate)

This messages goes to the developers mailing list, because I think only Typo3
developers or people who know the core very well will be able to tell that by
going into this direction to achieve some goal will be extremely painful with a
very low chance to succeed.

This does not mean you prevent people to try out creative ways of using Typo3,
but warn them that if what they want is to deliver something, it may be much
harder and require much more effort than expected. Also, if Typo3 cannot do it
today, it does not restrict what the future holds.

Cheers,
Stephane