[TYPO3-announce] Announcing TYPO3 4.2alpha3

Wed Jan 16 13:36:41 CET 2008

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

So what's new?

Cleaner Backend Project on the home straight

This alpha release can definitely be labeled as the "reincarnation of  
the backend". For the first time since TYPO3 3.5 we see a new default  
backend with many changes aiming to improve the usability for end  
users. The restructuring of the backend is called "Cleaner Backend  
Project" and is now mostly complete. Only minor quirks here and there  
still exist, which should be ironed out when the final version of  
TYPO3 4.2 ships. The new backend comes with a completely new toolbar  
at the top o the backend. This toolbar now contains the logout button,  
currently logged in user, workspace selector, a menu to clear caches,  
a shortcut menu, and a search field. Further changes introduced by the  
Cleaner Backend Project include a new toolbar when editing content  
elements and other records. The editor toolbar replaces the former  
buttons at the top and bottom of the editing forms by grouping them  
together and making them stick to the top of the form even if you  
scroll down. Another welcomed change concerns the clipboard. Until now  
it was unclear whether the clipboard was in copy or move mode, this  
has been resolved by adding a select box clearly stating the current  
mode. Tabs in forms now indicate whether a required is hidden present  
on them. Last but not least context sensitive help is now shown when  
you hover over the help icons you find in the backend.

Rich Text Editor keeps improving

In this release the RTE also has again seen some good improvements.  
The biggest,  and  likely most welcomed change for our many Mac users  
is the support of Safari 3, both on Mac and Windows machines. Other  
than that the RTE now supports even more semantically related tags,  
such as <blockquote>, <q>, <sub>, and <sup>.

"New front end login box" (newloginbox) now part of the core

You might know the login content element from the days before  
newloginbox. Back then it was a simple way (with not too many  
features) to make it possible for web site visitors to log in to  
restricted areas of a website. Since the first release of newloginbox  
this core content element lost more and more importance as the  
competing extension offered way more features. With this release the  
newloginbox comes back home to the core and sees its rebirth as  
"felogin" system extension. This new extension now completely replaces  
the former login content element by extracting the needed  
functionality from newloginbox. As you might know, too newloginbox  
also consisted of a second part, the user listing plugin. You can find  
this plugin as a new extension in TER, called "feuserlisting". This  
means that with the final release of TYPO3 4.2 newloginbox will be  
rendered obsolete and felogin and feuserlisting together take its  
place. Kudos concerning this goes to Steffen Kamper and Stefan  
Strasser for maintaining the former newloginbox and moving it back  
home into the core.

Developer relevant changes

This alpha3 release also some features especially interesting for  
extension developers. The list module offers a group of functions when  
extended view is enabled, using hooks you can now add own actions to  
this list. Until now when developing backend modules you were  
completely on your own concerning templates for the base layout of  
your module. This has now been changed as you can use similar  
functions (like when developing frontend plugins) to parse templates  
and replace markers with your content. An even more interesting  
feature is the availability of a unified AJAX interface for backend  
modules. Its concept is similar to that known from the eID feature for  
the frontend. You first register an ajaxId, which you then use to make  
AJAX requests to the newly introduced typo3/ajax.php. That file will  
then take care of delegating that request to the class/method you  
registered for the ajaxId. The extension manager now correctly adheres  
to the constraints you set for your extension. It is now possible to  
post process typolinks. New hooks have been added in db_list, TCEmain,  
and tslib_content. For some of them you need to implement interfaces,  
which are also new with this release.

Reminder: Raised minimum PHP version requirement

To run TYPO3 4.2alpha3 you need to have at least PHP 5.2 [1]. This  
move was necessary to use language 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.  
Special thanks for the help in making this release what it is deserve  
our most active community contributors Helmut Hummel, Malte Jansen,  
and Steffen Kamper (order not associated to any measures).

Next steps to 4.2

Please test this Alpha as much as possible, especially the new  
features from alpha1, alpha2, 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/!

The next release will be TYPO3 4.2 Beta1, which also declares feature  
freeze, locking down the development of new features and only allowing  
for bugfixes to be committed to the core. The beta1 release is  
targeted for the first week of February. If everything goes well and  
not too many bugs are found we will then continue with Release  
Candidates one or two weeks later. This means that you can expect the  
final version to be ready around mid or end of February.

For a detailed overview of the features planned for 4.2 and their  
progress, have a look at the 4.2 Development wiki page [2], the  
bugtracker [3], and the ChangeLog [4].

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

MD5 Sums:
3df77c554e59ed627fa1c2a2404ad734 dummy-4.2.0alpha3.tar.gz
1897fff5fa5e7171e0884a4f8cf17fa7 dummy-4.2.0alpha3.zip
172cc1f2d6df1b1f9290a10acf497b18 typo3_src-4.2.0alpha3.tar.gz
da3d706609b5c7a4f3302689d18cfe67 typo3_src-4.2.0alpha3.zip

cheers
Ingo

[1] http://buzz.typo3.org/people/stucki/article/leaving-php4-behind/
[2] http://wiki.typo3.org/index.php/4.2_Development
[3] http://bugs.typo3.org/
[4] http://typo3.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/typo3/TYPO3core/tags/TYPO3_4-2-0alpha3/ChangeLog?revision=2914&view=markup

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

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 2411 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.netfielders.de/pipermail/typo3-announce/attachments/20080116/82f91ba9/attachment.bin 