[TYPO3-english] the future of FCEs in TYPO3

[Domi]

Good Morning,

I would like to bring up a question which was bugging me for quite some 
time. Because there is a lot of discussion going on about TemplaVoila 
and the future of TYPO3.

I guess one of the main benefits which brought TV in the past was the 
very nice handling of the backend, which was looking very similar to the 
frontend layout - page layout and content elements. For pages the 
backend_layout was introduced long time ago which brings this feature 
more likely into the core and I would say this replaces one of the 
features of TV.

Then there comes the nice FCE handling in TV, which every editor loved 
because custom content elements where easy to use. Now I am concerned 
about this feature, because there are in my opinion two extensions 
battling doing the exact same thing: gridelements and fluidcontent.

In fluidcontent there is one html file responsible for everything: the 
backend layout and the frontend rendering. All what needs to be done is 
to point to the folder where all the content element html-files are 
stored - with one single line of typoscript and knowledge about fluid 
and flux - both well documented at http://fedext.net/viewhelpers.html

In gridelements there are multiple actions necessary for building one 
fce. Backend actions, then typoscript configuration and in the end the 
html file.

For the creation of one FCE the I spent at least 3-4 times longer doing 
the same thing with gridelements instead of fluidcontent.

Over 1.5 - 2 years ago for me as a web developer I need to decide which 
tool I want to use for my websites. As fluidcontent (previous fed) was 
further developed I choosed fluidcontent and don't want to miss it.

What I am concerned off is, that there are two extensions doing the same 
stuff: building flexible content elements which are very easy to use for 
editors. For the editor both created elements look identical, only the 
details in coding are different.

Exact that time - 1.5 or 2 years ago (I had some frustration in TV) I 
checked out Drupal - which had this flexible content building in version 
< 7 as community extension, from version 7 inside the core: it called 
CCK- content construction kit. There you have inside the admin a form 
where you build super easy content elements. I guess this is one of the 
key-killer-functions why Drupal was getting so huge because this feature 
was really neat and easy to use.

I would like to see something similar for TYPO3 inside the core. One way 
to build flexible content elements, because its a key feature for an 
easy to use CMS system. I know that there were rumours that gridelements 
would find its way into the core - if I am not mistaken it was TYPO3 
version 4.6, but not sure about it.

Why we don't collect some key features of both extensions and try to 
bring them into the core? The huge community behind TV and the huge 
community of Drupal shows, that flexible content elements are a "must 
have" for a CMS system. If the development time of both extensions would 
get merged into one extension, there would be several benefits: faster 
development, less bugs and maybe improving features like backend CRUD 
with click and joy handling.

All I would like to see in my beloved CMS: one proved and stable way of 
creating flexible content elements, that my editors build easy and 
frontend-save content. Because "content is king" (not sure why but I can 
say this a lot of times during one day).

I would vote for the extbase / fluid way for building FCE's. There must 
be a way why this framework found its way into the core and for me it 
was the only reason why I continued stick to TYPO3 and didn't moved to 
Drupal two years ago. Also the connection to Neos would be ...

All the best,
Dominic