[TYPO3-UG US] Status of TYPO3.us

[Zach Davis]

Alex Heizer wrote:

> I think both ways would be valid. pure-TS would truly be hardcore, but I 
> don't know how many people use that in a practical sense. I think it 
> should be in there, definitely, but I don't know to what extent, since 
> most of the sites I've seen use an HTML template and CSS along with a TS 
> setup, and a pure-TS setup only takes what is in the external files and 
> allows you to get rid of the files themselves. You still need the HTML 
> and CSS code, even with the pure-TS setup. The important thing is to 
> show how T3 handles templates and creating functionality with TS, and my 
> impression is a TS/HTML/CSS setup shows a lot of the basic foundation 
> for building a website (a la the original GoLive tutorial), and a 
> pure-TS setup just takes the HTML and incorporates it internally. But 
> including a pure-TS setup in the documentation would certainly provide 
> additional information for those who don't want to use external 
> templates. I honestly don't know how beneficial it would be to include, 
> outside of providing a more solid TS foundation, but the project's 
> supposed to help people gain a solid foundation of how T3 works on an 
> administration level... So that's a good question.
> 
> Any opinions, anyone?
> 

I think it's important to keep in mind, as we have this discussion, the 
fact that no matter which approach one takes -- the golive approach, 
which consists of a ts template object and an html template with subpart 
markers; the MTB approach, which is essentially the same as the golive 
approach except for the fact that automaketemplate puts your markers in 
the template for you based on ID attributes, and the templaVola 
approach, which at its core simply offers another way to map content 
elements to areas in an HTML template -- no matter which approach one 
takes, one will still learn a considerable amount about typoscript. I am 
not suggesting that we should teach new users how to setup a site using 
the new site wizard that comes with TV (although that's often an easy 
starting point) -- I'm just talking about how we map typoscript objects 
(whether it's temp.menu, lib.menu or styles.content.get) to a section in 
the template. No matter which approach we take, we're still going to 
have to carefully show the user what a tyopscript object is, how to read 
the tsref, etc. TemplaVoila is not, and really never has been, a 
substitute for typoscript -- I've always seen it as a substitute for the 
TEMPLATE object.

On that note, if we agree not to go with TV (and I see good arguments 
for and against it), then I really hope we can agree to setup the NPO 
template by storing the html template and css file in fileadmin, and 
bringing them in using a standard typoscript TEMPLATE object. That 
approach just makes sense -- it keeps the design (CSS / HTML) separate 
from the logic (TS template), which, as we all know, is a good practice. 
The "hardcore" TS template strikes me as hopelessly outdated and, more 
importantly, as an unnecessarily difficult way to put together a site in 
TYPO3. We should be showing how easy it is -- not how hard it can be.

best,
Zach