[TYPO3-announce] Announcing TYPO3 4.2alpha2

[Ingo Renner]

The core team is proud to announce the second Alpha of TYPO3 version  
4.2.

So what's new?

Community involvement

First of all this is the first release of TYPO3 since the core  
development mailinglist has been opened for public write access. The  
core team likes to thank all those who have been actively contributing  
to improve TYPO3 since then. We're stunned about the huge success of  
the open core development mailinglist and the many contributions!

Backend improvements

This version ships with the initial work of the "Cleaner backend"  
project which consists of several major parts. In the first step the  
backend was freed from the frames which have been replaced by div  
containers and a single iframe. A special thanks goes to Dirk Jesse  
from the YAML CSS Framework project for helping out here! To make the  
former top frame free for new tasks the secondary options in TCEforms  
now unfold directly at their parent input fields. After that was  
accomplished it was now possible to move other elements to newly won  
space in the new toolbar at the top. For now only the workspace  
selector has moved, but other elements will follow.
Another major task was the restyling of TCEforms to always have the  
buttons to save a document in sight at the top of the editing area.
You test the new backend by accessing it through typo3/backend.php.

Installer 2

The installer version 2 has been added to this release to make it easy  
to test the new version. This new installer is a complete rewrite of  
the old one by Thomas Hempel, it's now devided into two parts, the  
installer itself and a setup moduel which is accessible from the  
backend. When doing a new install you'll be prompted whether you want  
to use the old or the new installer. At the current state you can use  
the new installer in 1-2-3 mode only and then refine your settings  
from within the backend.

T3Editor

Also completely new in this version is the so called t3editor by  
Tobias Liebig which makes it possible to highlight TypoScript when  
editing TypoScript templates in the Web->Template module.

Linking to records using the RTE

A feature which was partly available in 4.1 already but unusable  
because of a typo is now fully implemented. Extensions can now link to  
records like tt_news items directly using a RTE wizard. This will not  
work out of the boy though as it needs support from the extensions  
which need to handle the rendering in the frontend.

More improvements to the RTE

Stanislas Rolland is back from his long holiday trip and has since  
kept on working on rtehtmlarea. He added several features to the RTE  
like making it possible to extend the RTE with own plugins. Other then  
that there seems to be an uncountable amunt of bugfixes which are  
always very much welcomed.

Improvements for the RTE

RTEmagic images are now duplicated when records are copied/versioned  
in tcemain. This is a long awaited feature that solves the bug that  
RTE magic images shared between two records would result in both  
disappearing if the one was deleted. Therefore this is also an  
important fix for Workspaces.

New language

The Galician language was added so that localizations can be  
downloaded as they become available from the translators. TYPO3 can  
now be translated into 49 languages.

Third party libraries

TYPO3 4.2alpha2 comes with updated javascript libraries, we now ship  
with prototype 1.6.0 and script.aculo.us 1.8.0. Libraries to minfy  
javascript and prevent cross site scripting (XSS) attacks have been  
added, too.

Raised minimum PHP version requirement

To run TYPO3 4.2alpha2 you need to have at least PHP 5.2. This move  
was necessary to use features introduced since PHP 5.0.

As always

Other then the highlighted features we also packed tons of bug fixes,  
performance improvements, enthusiasm, and love into this release.

Next steps to 4.2

Please test this Alpha as much as possible, especially the new  
features from alpha1 and those described above! If you're e.g. using  
one of the new features in a project of yours already and discover  
bugs, please report them immediately to http://bugs.typo3.org/!

During the next weeks, we will release one more Alpha before locking  
down the development of new features. We will then continue with Beta  
releases which are only meant for bug fixes before turning to Release  
Candidates and the final version of TYPO3 4.2. This means that you can  
expect the final version to be ready around the end of January '08.

For a detailed overview of the features planned for 4.2 and their  
progress, have a look at the 4.2 Development wiki page, the  
bugtracker, and the ChangeLog.

You can download the packages at http://typo3.org/download/packages/.

MD5 Sums:
52a869cd8aac9eb2e6fa8219061360ba dummy-4.2.0alpha2.tar.gz
089ef3683d5d50c963b26a42ba8686d6 dummy-4.2.0alpha2.zip
83b8dd66a1127650c12ee5ae2ef5350a typo3_src-4.2.0alpha2.tar.gz
8906c7115b6187ac99a44b0446deea5d typo3_src-4.2.0alpha2.zip
b36f1cbab564eabf873d948eb3307d2c typo3_src+dummy-4.2.0alpha2.zip

cheers
Ingo

-- 
Ingo Renner
TYPO3 Core Developer, Release Manager TYPO3 4.2



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