[TYPO3-UG US] Status of TYPO3.us

[Christopher]

On 12/17/05, Zach Davis <zach at castironcoding.com> wrote:

<big snip>

> 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.

Yes! But I don't know how this has turned into an either/or
proposition; if the project will be distributed as a complete site in
a tarball, and the goal is to teach users how to template a site, why
not just figure out how many methods there actually _are_ (I say
two...), and make a site based on each one? This would involve
relatively little extra work, and could be used to demonstrate a
useful feature of Typo3--multiple sites in one tree.

> TemplaVoila is not, and really never has been, a
> substitute for typoscript -- I've always seen it as a substitute for the
> TEMPLATE object.

Yes, that and a way of enabling BE users to switch templates easily.

My vote, if anyone's interested would be to show the TS-only way (i.e.
without automaketemplate), and the TV way. I think it'd be a really
poor decision to omit what I think is going to become the most widely
used templating system (i.e Templavoila) from what could be the most
modern piece of how-to documentation on the basis of some
squeamishness about including extensions. Honestly, I think it makes
no sense to worry about including extensions; by and large, extensions
are how new tools are added to the Typo3 toolbox--and this is as
important a thing to learn as any if you're going to come to grips
with how Typo3 works.

@Alex:
> SInce TV is an extension, and in no way helps you learn the proper way
> to create a site in TypoScript, it would appear in the appendix as an
> additional way to make a site, once the reader already knows the proper
> way to code a site.

This is, IMO, totally untrue. I haven't built a site the 'old' way
since the FTB tutorial appeared, and it's never made _any_ difference
to how much TS has been required to build the site. If anything, a
major hole in the current documentation--how to use TS in TV-based
sites to plan for small changes could be patched with this project
[1].


-Christopher



[1] The kind of thing I mean is related to the situation that arises
when you simply map the basic parts of the site to the html template
without thinking about what might be necessary later. For example, if
a banner or other object becomes necessary below a vertical navigation
menu at some point, it's certainly possible to add it to the html
template and remap it, but it's inconvenient. I find it much more
useful to map some empty objects into the template for the express
purpose of being able to add TS objects into the site as/if they
become necessary.

E.g. in a template, a navigation menu might look like this:

<div id="leftColumn">
  <ul id="navigation">
    <li><a href="foo/">Foo</a></li>
    <li><a href="bar/">Bar</a></li>
 </ul>
</div>

...and the unordered list might be mapped to lib.navigation. I find it
more useful to do some variant of this:

<div id="leftColumn">
  <div>Pre</div>

  <ul id="navigation">
    <li><a href="foo/">Foo</a></li>
    <li><a href="bar/">Bar</a></li>
 </ul>

  <div>Post</div>
</div>

...and map the objects this way:

lib.leftColumn.pre
lib.leftColumn.navigation
lib.leftColumn.post

If the .pre and .post objects start out life as empty TS objects, the
result is just the same, but you can _immediately_ add new TS objects.
As many posts on the list will prove, this is not immediately obvious
to people starting out with either automaketmplate or TV.