[TYPO3-doc] TypoScript reference

[Francois Suter]

Hi all,

This subject was spawned by the "vision" thread. To sum it up in a few 
words: we have a problem with the TypoScript reference.

Currently the TSref is an Open Office manual, which is rendered as HTML 
on typo3.org. The URLs of the pages keep changing, so it's not possible 
to have permanent links to a specific TS item. The manual is also used 
by sysext tsconfig_help to rebuild the in-line help from inside the 
TYPO3 BE. The code that achieves that is pretty ugly - believe me I 
worked on it - mostly because it is very hard to extract the information 
from the OO document.

On top of that, the t3editor team maintains its own version of the 
TypoScript reference in order to be able to provide auto-completion. 
This version is a XML file. It is quite different from the TSref, 
because it needs to be much stricter. The problem - of course - is that 
it requires its own maintenance, meaning double work with the updating 
of the OO manual.

I already discussed this issue with Tobias Liebig at T3DD09, but it 
didn't go any further.

Here's what I could envision to try and solve the above-mentioned problems:

- the XML file from the t3editor team should be considered as the base 
for any future work, because it introduces a much stricter structure 
than the OO manual.
- furthermore it would probably be pretty easy to render individual 
typo3.org pages based on that XML file (since it is well structured).
- it is also probably pretty easy to add information to that XML 
structure, like TYPO3 version (which property is available in which 
version) and code examples.
- the TSref could be restructured to become more strictly a reference, 
with as little as possible of other content (which could be moved to 
other manuals, like the usage of feAdminLib...). With a leaner TSref, if 
should be possible to generate all reference tables by applying a XSL 
transformation to the reference XML file, then copy and paste the rest 
of the content from some other file and the TSref would be up to date 
(yes, I know the details are vague, but it seems globally possible and 
I'm just proposing a scenario for now).

What do you think about this?

-- 

Francois Suter
Cobweb Development Sarl - http://www.cobweb.ch