[TYPO3-ttnews] tt_news 3.0 news

[Dan Osipov]

Great to see so much progress!!

Questions: Are all the caching options using 4.3 caching framework?
Are there concrete plans for 3.0 release? It's been in development for 
quite a while, and it would be great to see a simultaneous TYPO3 4.3 and 
tt_news 3.0 release...

Thanks for all your work!

Dan Osipov
Calkins Media
http://danosipov.com/blog/

Rupert Germann wrote:
> hi,
> 
> here are some news from the tt_news project. 
> I just committed a bunch of changed files containing some possibly
> interesting new features and enhancements.
> 
> * performance improvement: internal caching of processing intensive values.
>   - archive periods: getting the newscount for every archive period is a   
>     quite "expnsive" operation as there can be a lot of these periods. These 
>     counts are now cached internally which reduces the rendering time of the 
>     archive menu drastically (of course only if there's actually something 
>     in the cache). 
>   - categories: the categories (and also subcategories) for a news article 
>     are now stored in the internal cache, too.
>     This reduces the amount of queries which has to be made to display a 
>     listview.
>   - internal caching for newscounts in category menus with 2 stages: getting 
>     the newscounts for categories is also a very expensive operation 
>     especially when the categorymenu is a USER_INT object (which is required 
>     for the ajax expand/collapse to work).
>     Now the newscounts are cached seperately for each category and also in 
>     an array containing the complete counts for a category menu in a 
>     certain state.
> 
> * SQL query improvements: 
>   - the "Distinct" subselect for the listquery is now only added if it is 
>     actually needed (in case when news are selected by category)
>   - removed the "orderby" part from the count query for lists
> * added indices for tt_news.datetime and tt_news_cat.parent_category
> 
> I used only "datetime" as a key field because this had the best effect in my
> installation. In this installation I don't use time information from
> enableFields (starttime,endtime) in quries and the archivedate field is
> also mostly empty. In other installations where you f.e. make more use of
> archivedate or starttime, endtime another mysql index configuration might
> give better results.
> "better results" means: prevent full table scans (mysql EXPLAIN ....) 
>         
> * new extmanager options: 
>  - useInternalCaching (as the name says, enabled by default), 
>  - cachingMode: this determines the cache entries lifetime and if the 
>    internal cache from tt_news will be cleared by TYPO3. 
>    
>    "normal": (default) the cache entries will get the same lifetime as 
>    normal pages. The tt_news cache will be cleared when the "clear all 
>    caches" button is pressed. 
>    
>    "lifetime": will set the livetime of cache entries to the given amount of 
>    seconds in field "cacheLifetime". The cache table is not cleared 
>    when "clear all caches" is clicked. 
> 
>    "static": the lifetime of cache entries is set to zero (= unlimited). 
>    TYPO3 does not clear the tt_news cache (useful if you clear the cache    
>    with an external script or for debugging).
>  
>  - cacheLifetime: lifetime in seconds of the internal cache entries (used 
>    only when cachingMode is "lifetime").
>  - writeCachingInfoToDevlog: Which information about internal caching should 
>    be written to devlog (extension "devlog" required).
>     "disabled": don't write any information about caching to devlog. 
>     "cache misses": log only cache misses. 
>     "all": log cache misses and cache hits to devlog.
>     parsetimeThreshold: Execution time in seconds after which a single 
>     function is logged to devlog. 
> 
> TypoScript changes:     
> ----------------------------
> * added a lot of TS default variables to setup.txt (These options are not 
>   new but before they were only mentioned in the manual and were
>   not visible by default in TypoScriptObjectBrowser)
> * changed the default TS for date formatting for all "codes" to a consistent 
>   format (%d.%m.%Y) and removed the non localized "of" in 
>   displaySingle.date_stdWrap.strftime 
> 
> * "related news by category" do now have their own TS namespace. Before this 
>   the settings for relNewsByCat had to be configured in "displayList." 
>   which made it quite unhandy to configure. Now "related news by category" 
>   use relNewsByCategory{} which is a copy of the whole plugin.tt_news{} 
>   array. This makes it possible to deliver an "out-of-the-box" working 
>   default configuration and it gives you more possibilties to adapt the
>   output to your needs. 
> * added a TS condition to disable the icons in related news by a TS 
>   constants switch.
> * added a TS condition to directly switch the archiveMode and change the 
>   rendering of archiveTitleCObject accordingly by a TS constants switch.  
> * changed initialisation of "multipageSingleView". Now 
>   useMultiPageSingleView is not activated automatically anymore when 
>   maxWordsInSingleView has a non zero value. 
> * singleView pagebrowser now uses the same pagebrowser as a normal list view
> (with own config array: plugin.tt_news.singleViewPageBrowser)
>           
> other:
> * moved the pagebrowser initialisation/call to a new function:   
>   getPagebrowserContent()
> * the archivemenu is now able to display dates in the future
> * fix for xmlIcon path: now "EXT:" is resolved correctly in the image path
> * cleanup: moved all record icons to the new folder res/gfx/
>         
> 
> 
> You can get the changed version either by checking it out from svn
> http://forge.typo3.org/repositories/show/extension-tt_news
> or download a t3x from here:
> http://rgdata.de/fileadmin/tt_news/T3X_tt_news-3_0_0-dev.t3x
> 
> since I didn't had the time until now to update the manual the changelog is
> your documentation.
> 
> greets
> rupert
> 
> 
> 
>