[TYPO3-english] Spacers and other beginner questions

[Marian Schedenig]

Hi!

After trying on and off over the course of several months to get my website 
remade/ported to typo3, I'm finally getting close to what I want it to be. A 
couple of points still have me puzzled though. I'd welcome any hints 
regarding the following issues:

1) Spacers

I have a two level navigation structure, with a horizontal main menu and a 
vertical sub menu showing the available pages for the category selected in 
the main menu. For some of these categories, I need a little more structure, 
so I want to group the 2nd level pages into sections. My understanding is 
that this is what spacers ("visual menu separators") are for: Before each 
group of pages, add a spacer with a name for the group and setup the menu so 
that the text is displayed but not linked.

Well, this is how I configured my spacer:

lib.submenu.1.SPC = 1
lib.submenu.1.SPC {
  allWrap = |
  doNotShowLink = 0
  doNotLinkIt = 1
}

However, the spacers don't show up. And by that I mean not even in the 
source code - there's no hint at all that there is anything between two 
regular menu items. Why?

2) tt_news calendar

I'm using timtab to create a blog, but I don't want to use the archive (at 
least not for now). The regular list should normally display the latest 
entries (full length), clicking on an entry then shows that entry and all 
its comments. Next to the list, I want an AMENU to be able to quickly access 
older entries. The AMENU does a fine job of listing all available months and 
linking them, but clicking on the links doesn't affect the entries displayed 
- the news list plugin seems to ignore the AMENU parameters.

3) TypoScript conditions

Below each blog comment, I want to display something like:
Posted by Musgit on Saturday, May 9th, 2009 at 04:52 in Blog Test, Sub 2

The user name should be a link if the user specified a website, but be 
regular plain text if no URL is available. I've never used conditions in 
TypoScript, so I'm unsure how to do that.

Cheers,
Marian.

-- 
Hofstadter's law: "It always takes longer than you think,
even when you take account of Hofstadter's law".