[TYPO3-ttnews] Ext:news – some content related questions

[Thomas Skierlo]

Hi,

I'm currently diving deeper into the latest news version and I have some 
questions left:

1) Is there any disadvantage in not using the internal „Text“ input of 
news at all. I would prefer pure standard content, which might include 
own content elements, like sliders, tabs, accordions and so on. Tried it 
this way, and everything seems to be working properly. But maybe with 
some caveats?

2) If not, wouldn't it be a great idea to get rid of the element? It 
doubles the work needed to integrate things like lightboxes and 
galleries, and it encourages users to use rte images, which probably 
will never be able to be responsive. Relying on pure standard content 
would probably ease further development a lot.

3) I'm working with a Twitter Bootstrap grid to get responsive features. 
Therefore things like 
„plugin.tx_news.settings.detail.media.image.maxWidth“ must be 
„responsive“ too, depending on the placement of the plugin. „maxWidth“ 
doesn't seem to offer stdWrap, so it is getting rather complicated to 
get it to behave dynamicly. Is there a way to achieve this, or to 
reference site wide settings, like „styles.content.imgtext.maxWInText“, 
„styles.content.imgtext.maxW“ or „styles.content.imgtext.linkWrap.width“ 
instead of hard-coding identical values into the detail view?

4) A typical news article, like on http://www.spiegel.de/, consists of 
typical elements. For the detail view: a title, a big teaser image, a 
teaser text and the bodytext. Plus some related files or links at the 
bottom. For the list view: A title, a teaser image (or none) and a 
teaser text with a „more“ link.

Currently all this is possible with ext:news, only in a pretty complex 
way. Imagine you want one image to be placed as a teaser image above the 
teaser text (whole width of column), and you define the first one of the 
media-relations stack to be that image, you will need 4 nested if 
clauses in your template to isolate it from the rest. To render the 
remaining media files underneath the article you will even need more if 
clauses, since you have to get rid of the banner image. Besides that you 
must define the first media object used to be of banner-type to get this 
working – which means, if you don't want to use a banner for an article, 
you have to insert an empty media image. Try to explain this to an 
average editor. Wouldn't it be much easier to add a distinct teaser 
media field which is independant of the current media field? It could 
offer own width and height settings and would ease the job for editors 
and administrators a lot.

5) Last question: If I remember it right the old tt_news allowed 
pagination in detail view too. Tried it once without big success. It was 
not very stable. I'm currently writing articles which are more that 20 
A4 pages long. Are there any plans to offer pagination for articles in 
future?

Besides all my questions. Thanks for this extension. Keep up the good 
work. I've learned a lot about Extbase from ext:news.

Regards,

Thomas Skierlo