[TYPO3-dev] Announcing TYPO3 4.2alpha3

[Ingo Renner]

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