[TYPO3-dev] FORM element

[Christopher Torgalson]

On 5/21/07, Ernesto Baschny [cron IT] <ernst at cron-it.de> wrote:
> Steffen Kamper wrote: on 19.05.2007 00:27:
>
> > first of all i'm glad to hear from you as a core developer. I know many user
> > are wish a better module for the daily work, but without support from core
> > team it's difficult.
>
> I felt exactly the oposite way: We had some pretty hard work to get very
> near to the success in enhancing that part, but we had a total lack of
> support from users needing that functionalty when the problems arose and
> I had no time to work on that anymore. I remember calling for "help"
> several times in the mailing lists to see if someone wanted to finish
> the work, but noone seemed interested.
>
> So if you are interested and have some meaningful ideas in form of a
> patch or change request, I am sure we will gladly review it in the core.
>
> >> +1 on that. Some time ago I had some "ideas" about it, but was stalled
> >> when I hit the ugly cow of backwards compatibility:
> >>
> >> http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=2119
>
> > Very good to know. I will look at your patch. Why is this open for so long
> > time, can you give me a specific hint of the main problem ?
>
> The main problem was backwards compatibility. Using that new
> functionality would not only deprecate but obsolete some settings (like
> "accessiblity=1") which would leave old sites that upgrade to 4.0.x with
> somehow "different looking" sites. Looking at it now I would say that we
> should have dared the change, but this was one of the major concearns at
> that time: a smooth upgrade path from 3.8.x to 4.0.0. So the work
> "stuck" because noone was able to continue what I have started and added
> that compatibility layer, which is a pretty annoying and time consuming
> task, because you have to test and think about so many differnet situations.
>
> > this is always a problem, because time is a rare thing. And everyone has to
> > set his own priorities - anyway to less time.
> > I will make a little project for that starting from ECT and placed on Wiki
> > so everyone is invited to support and adding ideas.
> > Backwards compatibility could be achieved by a flag, simular to the table
> > object.
>
> The TS was not the problem at that time, but the changes in handling of
> the settings in PHP. In my eyes it make much more sense and made it more
> flexible how I reorganized the wrappings (no HTML tags in PHP anymore),
> but this made old TS incompatible with it. So what was missing was a
> compatibility switch in PHP to keep old-school TS happy. I must confess
> that this frustrated me and kept me from going on on that matter.
>
> The content rendering group would be best place to discuss the ideas in
> this area, and not the ECT, as everything that has to do with "content
> rending" in the core should go through that group. So if you can, please
> followup your ideas in that list.


Possibly a stupid question: could we not just use the compatibility
condition to 'choose' between the existing form function and an
entirely new one?


-- 
Christopher Torgalson
http://www.typo3apprentice.com/