[TYPO3-english] THEMES - the tool for Designers, Template Builders and Content Creators

Fri Jun 14 03:15:28 CEST 2013

Hi Joey

Thanks for your input.

Domi had also a great input which I would like to copy here to keep the
discussion together at one place:

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
athttp://fedext.net/viewhelpers.**html<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

On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 9:37 PM, JoH asenau <info at cybercraft.de> wrote:

> Am 13.06.2013 12:32, schrieb Andreas Becker:
>
> I think that many will agree that having packages and themes will help
> improving the user base of TYPO3 CMS. So I won't comment on that part.
>
> Nevertheless there is one thing I would like to avoid: Replacing one
> "golden hammer" with another. That said, I still highly appreciate what is
> going on with fluidcontent, themes and gridelements. But please don't make
> the same mistakes that have been done when TemplaVoila was introduced as
> "futuristic template building", since this will raise expectations that we
> might not be able to fulfill later on.
>
> Now lets get to the facts:
>
>
>  TVFW started to build up a Skin Repository in TER with standardized
>> exchangable skins. In front of customers it is possible to flip nice
>> designs and the content flips into the right position. As TemplaVoila is
>> unfortunately an dead end in its current state, the question for
>> alternatives came up. Claus Due build Fedext and Joe Gridelements. The one
>> is storing the Backend data in the Backend which makes it a bit more
>> difficult to exchange it,
>>
>
> Gridelements can do both, save structures to the DB as well as put them
> into TSconfig, so it's up to the user to decide about the way to go.
>
>
>  It has all those extended features of Claus Dues Fluid Content and Fluid
>> Pages as it is build on it and it can work with grid elements soon.
>>
>
> This is something that I have discussed with Kay already and we will be
> working on that task soon. Currently my major task is to provide the
> extended manuals and the tutorial DVD that we promised our sponsors during
> the crowd funding phase of Gridelements.
>
> They will already make use of some nice examples for a first so called
> "Grid Package" based on twitter bootstrap, so people will get a notion of
> the things to come when the official "Grid Packages" will be released.
>
> We will have a workshop called "Kickstarting Grid Packages" at the
> Developer Days in Hamburg. So I expect a first roadmap and some concepts
> for the packages to be available in July.
>
> Since the last crowd funding campaign was quite successful, we are
> planning to have another one especially for "Grid Packages". Kay Strobach
> and Arno Dudek already joined our team on startnext and we are going to
> start the new project soon.
>
> It will collect money for certain packages and each sponsoring will count
> as a vote for the package it is related to. This way we will produce only
> those packages that people really want to use. People can do requests for
> packages as well.
>
> Each of these will just be the base for the upcoming themes that will
> build upon it.
> So the goal is i.e. to get a standardized twitter bootstrap package, that
> will enable you to make use of almost any theme based on that framework.
> Same of course for other frameworks, but the people will decide which one
> we will create.
>
> The collected money will then be used to have developers and designers
> focused on the packages they decide to work on.
>
> A rough timeline that I already discussed with Kay is connected to the
> release of TYPO3 CMS 6.2. LTS in October. We expect to release those theme
> packages until the end of 2013 as well, so the can be a reliable base for
> TYPO3 CMS beginners for the following 3 years.
>
> Let's do it!
>
> Cheers
>
> Joey
>
> --
> Wenn man keine Ahnung hat: Einfach mal Fresse halten!
> (If you have no clues: simply shut your gob sometimes!)
> Dieter Nuhr, German comedian
> Xing: http://contact.cybercraft.de
> Twitter: http://twitter.com/bunnyfield
> TYPO3 cookbook (2nd edition): http://www.typo3experts.com
>
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