[TYPO3-dev] Creating an image-processing framework

[Andreas Wolf]

Hi my fellow TYPO3 developers ;),

one of the things I have always disliked about TYPO3 is the setup -
especiall the part of configuring image-processing. Each
ImageMagick-version behaves differently, and there are also bugs in the
setup-tool so it's a PITA to setup e.g. ImageMagick 6 for use in TYPO3.

Recently, I had to setup a quite a number of installations on one server, so
I had to repeat all the steps over and over again, and as I said, IM 6 and
T3 are not the best friends, so I really became annoyed...

An idea that came to my mind is that a component similar to the DBAL, but
for graphics-processing, could help here. I imagine it to be a new
service-type, let's call it imageProc. This service implements several
subtypes, one for each "supported" image-type (jpeg, gif, png, ai, pdf, tif
etc). The service-implementations internally handle what to do when asked
for resizing, cropping, rotating, blurring and so on. This would also make
it easier to introduce support for new ip-frameworks into TYPO3, e.g.
GraphicsMagick (I know, it's already supported... Just an example ;)).

The show-stopper of this would be that the configuration for the different
ImageMagick versions is carried within the service. So when an admin
installs TYPO3, the InstallTool will call a class within the services
parent-class, which will then figure out the ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick
version and present a preset configuration to the user.
This would mean that we need to collect the correct configuration for as
many ImageMagick-versions as possible, to have a large set of predefined
values, so that a high percentage of (new) T3-installations will be covered
by the presets.
If a version is not found within the presets, the service could try to find
a similar version (e.g. we don't have 5.5.7, but we have 5.5.6 oder 5.5.0)
and ask the user to test this preset, adjust it and submit the results.

The advantage of removing direct image-processing functionality from the
core is that the imageproc-extension could be updated independently, e.g.
to add new configurations or solve bugs with certain versions.

So, what do you think of this? I'm excited to hear your comments :)

Cheers,

Andreas