[TYPO3-dev] FORM element

[Ernesto Baschny [cron IT]]

Steffen Kamper wrote: on 19.05.2007 00:27:

> first of all i'm glad to hear from you as a core developer. I know many user 
> are wish a better module for the daily work, but without support from core 
> team it's difficult.

I felt exactly the oposite way: We had some pretty hard work to get very
near to the success in enhancing that part, but we had a total lack of
support from users needing that functionalty when the problems arose and
I had no time to work on that anymore. I remember calling for "help"
several times in the mailing lists to see if someone wanted to finish
the work, but noone seemed interested.

So if you are interested and have some meaningful ideas in form of a
patch or change request, I am sure we will gladly review it in the core.

>> +1 on that. Some time ago I had some "ideas" about it, but was stalled
>> when I hit the ugly cow of backwards compatibility:
>>
>> http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=2119

> Very good to know. I will look at your patch. Why is this open for so long 
> time, can you give me a specific hint of the main problem ?

The main problem was backwards compatibility. Using that new
functionality would not only deprecate but obsolete some settings (like
"accessiblity=1") which would leave old sites that upgrade to 4.0.x with
somehow "different looking" sites. Looking at it now I would say that we
should have dared the change, but this was one of the major concearns at
that time: a smooth upgrade path from 3.8.x to 4.0.0. So the work
"stuck" because noone was able to continue what I have started and added
that compatibility layer, which is a pretty annoying and time consuming
task, because you have to test and think about so many differnet situations.

> this is always a problem, because time is a rare thing. And everyone has to 
> set his own priorities - anyway to less time.
> I will make a little project for that starting from ECT and placed on Wiki 
> so everyone is invited to support and adding ideas.
> Backwards compatibility could be achieved by a flag, simular to the table 
> object.

The TS was not the problem at that time, but the changes in handling of
the settings in PHP. In my eyes it make much more sense and made it more
flexible how I reorganized the wrappings (no HTML tags in PHP anymore),
but this made old TS incompatible with it. So what was missing was a
compatibility switch in PHP to keep old-school TS happy. I must confess
that this frustrated me and kept me from going on on that matter.

The content rendering group would be best place to discuss the ideas in
this area, and not the ECT, as everything that has to do with "content
rending" in the core should go through that group. So if you can, please
followup your ideas in that list.

Cheers,
Ernesto