[TYPO3-doc] TypoScript reference

[Tobias Liebig]

Hej,


thanks for raising this issue. It's true, that TypoScript lacks on 
having a real reference and a well-sturctured base.

As you already wrote, the t3editor autocompletion is based on a XML file 
which is maintained manually. You can get the latest XML from the forge 
SVN [1]

It should be no problem to transform the data from this XML to whatever 
you want. We just need to define what to render and how it should look like.

Maybe we should start to create a "prototype" for the TSRef. Based on 
this prototype we can plan how to transform the XML into this documentation.

Stephan Petzl and Christian Kartnig (who developed the autocompletion 
feature) had started at one time to create a wiki-like tool to maintain 
the XML-file, but i think it's not in use anymore.

Currently i'm at the T3BOARD. Perhaps a find someone to help me to 
create an online-tsref-prototype document like i would love to see it once.

I'll also invite Stephan and Christian to join this discussion.

[1] 
http://forge.typo3.org/repositories/entry/extension-t3editor/trunk/tsref/tsref.xml


regards,
    tobias



Francois Suter schrieb:
> Hi all,
> 
> This subject was spawned by the "vision" thread. To sum it up in a few 
> words: we have a problem with the TypoScript reference.
> 
> Currently the TSref is an Open Office manual, which is rendered as HTML 
> on typo3.org. The URLs of the pages keep changing, so it's not possible 
> to have permanent links to a specific TS item. The manual is also used 
> by sysext tsconfig_help to rebuild the in-line help from inside the 
> TYPO3 BE. The code that achieves that is pretty ugly - believe me I 
> worked on it - mostly because it is very hard to extract the information 
> from the OO document.
> 
> On top of that, the t3editor team maintains its own version of the 
> TypoScript reference in order to be able to provide auto-completion. 
> This version is a XML file. It is quite different from the TSref, 
> because it needs to be much stricter. The problem - of course - is that 
> it requires its own maintenance, meaning double work with the updating 
> of the OO manual.
> 
> I already discussed this issue with Tobias Liebig at T3DD09, but it 
> didn't go any further.
> 
> Here's what I could envision to try and solve the above-mentioned problems:
> 
> - the XML file from the t3editor team should be considered as the base 
> for any future work, because it introduces a much stricter structure 
> than the OO manual.
> - furthermore it would probably be pretty easy to render individual 
> typo3.org pages based on that XML file (since it is well structured).
> - it is also probably pretty easy to add information to that XML 
> structure, like TYPO3 version (which property is available in which 
> version) and code examples.
> - the TSref could be restructured to become more strictly a reference, 
> with as little as possible of other content (which could be moved to 
> other manuals, like the usage of feAdminLib...). With a leaner TSref, if 
> should be possible to generate all reference tables by applying a XSL 
> transformation to the reference XML file, then copy and paste the rest 
> of the content from some other file and the TSref would be up to date 
> (yes, I know the details are vague, but it seems globally possible and 
> I'm just proposing a scenario for now).
> 
> What do you think about this?
>