[Neos] Setting up a Noes site for the first time is a pain

[Lienhart Woitok]

Hello friends,

sorry for the harsh subject, but since some days I spent large parts of my evenings with playing around with Neos, and the only real result I achieved so far is frustration.

Yesterday I failed for one and a half hour to add my own node type to Neos. I went with the documentation "Creating a simple content element" and added the yaml configuration, the TypoScript and the template to my site package. I got as far as being able to sort of add a content element of my node type to a page, i.e. it appeared in the new content element wizard and when I clicked on it the wizard closed and the spinner in the plus button started spinning and stopped only when I hit reload in the browser (after some time). The only proof I could find of the existence of that node was the structure which listed it, but clicking didn't even show it in the inspector. I gave up at that point, it was late in the night. Today I talked shortly to Andi about that and he told me the node was probably not rendered. I checked that this evening and in the html source of the backend page I found a html comment with an exception about an @class missing in TypoScript. After some further debugging I found a cached old version of the TypoScript which just missed my TypoScript. I removed the cache file and voila, my content element appeared. Sort of. At least it showed in the inspector now.

Conclusion: the documentation should warn about caches being a probable source of such errors. Is production context (which is configured if one followed the documentation) the right choice for adding node types?

So my content element appeared in form of a - this time visible - exception message about the template not being found. The exception is correct, the template is not where Neos tries to find it. According to the documentation I created my template in Resources/Private/Templates/TypoScriptObjects/, but Neos searches in Resources/Private/Templates/NodeTypes. Why? I went to development context in the hope this helps. Well, it doesn't. I debugged into the TypoScript package - code I didn't intend to see so early in my Neos experience - and found TYPO3\TypoScript\Core\Parser->parse() is given a different prototype definition for my node type than the one I configured. I could not find where this magically (?) came from.

While writing this I did have a closer look again at the TYPO3.NeosDemoTypo3Org package and its TypoScript. The first thing I found are TypoScript includes. This explains why my TypoScript template hasn't been loaded. But again, no mention of that potential pitfall in the documentation. Again it took me quite some time to find out the hard way.

After including my TypoScript I got my node type to finally show.

So, success for now, I can go on with playing around.

I hope this feedback helps in smoothing the experience for other early adopters, I'm probably not the only one who is running or will be running into these traps.

Greetings,

Lienhart Woitok
Web-Entwickler

Telefon: +49 (911) 539909 - 0
E-Mail: Lienhart.Woitok at netlogix.de
Website: media.netlogix.de<http://media.netlogix.de>

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