[TYPO3-english] Spacers and other beginner questions

[Jigal van Hemert]

Hi Marian,

Marian Schedenig wrote:
> 1) Spacers
> so I want to group the 2nd level pages into sections. My understanding is 
> that this is what spacers ("visual menu separators") are for: Before each 
> group of pages, add a spacer with a name for the group and setup the menu so 
> that the text is displayed but not linked.

Spacers are indeed meant for making seperators. In TSRef you can read 
[1] that:
	Spacers are pages of the doktype "Spacer". These are not viewable pages 
but "placeholders" which can be used to divide menuitems.

So, basically they are empty elements in a menu that you can configure 
as you like to seperate the other menu items.

For example:

lib.menu = HMENU
lib.menu {
   1 = TMENU
   1 {
     NO {
       wrapItemAndSub = <div class="normal-menuitem">|</div>
     }
     SPC = 1
     SPC {
       wrapItemAndSub = <div class="spacer_menuitem">|</div>
       stdWrap.field = title
     }
   }
}

This wrap the normal items in a div, the spacer items are also wrapped 
in another div and display the title field of the seperator page.
Because a page of type 'Spacer' is not viewable the menu item is not a 
link by default.

> 2) tt_news calendar
> 
> I'm using timtab to create a blog, but I don't want to use the archive (at 
> least not for now). The regular list should normally display the latest 
> entries (full length), clicking on an entry then shows that entry and all 
> its comments. Next to the list, I want an AMENU to be able to quickly access 
> older entries. The AMENU does a fine job of listing all available months and 
> linking them, but clicking on the links doesn't affect the entries displayed 
> - the news list plugin seems to ignore the AMENU parameters.

AMENU is short for "Archive MENU", so in fact you *are* using the 
archive :-)
The manual of tt_news [2] tells that a LATEST element
	"lists only non-archived new-records, and it is not influenced by the 
archive menu selection. (This behaviour can be changed by setting 
“displayArchivedInLatest” to 1 -> then LATEST will act like a normal LIST)"

So that explains why the LATEST list doesn't respond you the links you 
click on in the AMENU and how you can change that.

> 3) TypoScript conditions
> 
> Below each blog comment, I want to display something like:
> Posted by Musgit on Saturday, May 9th, 2009 at 04:52 in Blog Test, Sub 2
> 
> The user name should be a link if the user specified a website, but be 
> regular plain text if no URL is available. I've never used conditions in 
> TypoScript, so I'm unsure how to do that.

TYPO3 does not like to show visitors links to pages which are not 
accessible and does not like to show empty links. So if you let TYPO3 
build the links for you (i.e. you do not code the <a href stuff 
yourself) it will simply not render a link if that field is empty.


[1] 
http://typo3.org/documentation/document-library/references/doc_core_tsref/4.1.0/view/10/2/

[2] 
http://typo3.org/documentation/document-library/extension-manuals/tt_news/2.5.0/view/1/3/#id2926212

Regards,
-- 
Jigal van Hemert.