[TYPO3-ttnews] Success - RIP tt_news, hello tx_news

[Thomas Skierlo]

Hi Georg, Hi everybody,

What a great feeling to finally de-install tt_news after migrating to 
tx_news. Following Georg's advice I installed the latest trunk version, 
which behaved much better than the current release - and finally 
succeeded in migrating everything to the new fluid paradigms, fully 
multilingual, with a localized category hierarchy, category icons and 
multiple layouts, like list, latest, front-page etc. Even the 
(non-typical) problem of localized DAM images (like an image with 
localized text overlaid) can be solved by including "standard" content 
from a "not-in-menu" page, linked to the news record. Now I have a 
perfect match to my old tt_news setup, but with a few questions and 
smaller problems left:

1) Category menu (Templates/Category/List.html). Is there a possibility 
to sort the categories for FE rendering? The "sorting" field from DB 
'tx_news_domain_model_category' is respected only in the BE. Without an 
influence on the sorting it's nearly impossible to add a new category or 
subcategory without breaking the personal strategy of category sequencing.

2) Single view: In my old tt_news setup I had links to previous/next 
article in single view. Is there a way to get this page-browser 
functionality into tx_news?

3) I wanted dramatical changes to the templates and the styles (less 
divs, less and more descriptive classes a.s.o.). To achive this I had to 
copy and modify the html Templates, the Layouts, the Partials and the 
stylesheets -- I changed about 10 files and added own Partials. What 
worries me a little is the next update of the extension. In old tt_news 
days there was only a template and some typoscript, today I needed no 
Typoscript at all (will Typoscript finally die?) but a lot of customized 
files instead. I think, updating fluid/Extbase based extensions might be 
a much harder task than doing the same with old-school extensions.

tx_news seems to be an excellent extension, and for me it's ready for 
production. The MVC principles, as well as fluid, are very easy to 
understand - at least if you have some MVC background. It's more to chew 
for the classical TYPO3 integrators, which did not have to know much 
about programming at all.

Thank you Georg for your excellent work.

Thomas Skierlo