[TYPO3-templavoila] Templavoila revisited

[Franz Koch]

Hi Elmar,

> it's nearly a year ago that I last tried templavoila. After that tests I
> changed back to traditional templates. The main reasons were:
> 
>  * Somehow TV conflicted with traditional pages in the same installation.
>  * The TV page module was less intuitive for me than the traditional,  
>    especially when comming to multilanguage editing.
>  * There was to much of klicking to connect the template with the content.
>  * I lost this this work for unknown reasons and needed to 
>    restart the whole connecting procedure several times.
> 
> However, many people like to work with TV and there must be good reasons for
> that. I wonder if TV is ripe enough today, that it can convice developers
> like me, that are used to the advantages and setup speed of traditional
> templates.
> 
> I guess that a lot of improvements have been done during the last monthes.
> Do you see improvements that important, that I should give TV a next try?

I used TV for my last 6 or 7 projects now. In the first projects there where some mapping problems with UTF-8-sites where the database didn't support utf-8 collation natively. But if you do everything told (DB-charset utf-8, BE[forceCharset]=utf-8,setDBinit 'SET NAMES utf8' as you should do anyway for utf-8 pages) there are no problems at all.

And for the amount of clicks to map a template. Well - this hasn't changed - but actually everybody has it's own workflow and his own way of creating templates that are used (partly) over and over again. You can do the same with TV. I for example used almost the same DataStructure for 4 or 5 projects now where the layouts came from different designer. I created the HTML-template based on the layout and my templating style, imported the TV settings from one of the other sites and was almost finished. So it's not that bad as you might think.

What I really like in TV is the translation handling. I have one older website that uses the traditional page module and is multilingual. Actually I had no clue and didn't find out how to actually keep the overview in all that columns when I had to change some parts of the site lately. In that point TV is great - you can either see all languages at once and have a good overview what is missing, or you can switch to languages - but you stil have the nice layout of the page and keep the overview (when using me_templavoilalayout).

What I also like is the possibility to pic the most important page-fields and put them on to of every page in the section 'page related information'. So the editors can f.e. see directly the current keywords, meta-description etc. and when they click on them, the get a nicely reduce BE-form where they can change the most important fields. No need to edit the page-properties and see some sparely needed fields in the regular workflow.


But there are also some point's I don't like in TV - the missing sorting options (cut and paste is sometimes one click to much), the missing feature to disable the template-selection-wizard for editors when not needed and some other small things. But overall I prefer no TV and like the flexibility with the FCEs.

-- 
Kind regards,
Franz Koch