[TYPO3-ttnews] tt_news 3.0 news

[Rupert Germann]

hi,

here are some news from the tt_news project. 
I just committed a bunch of changed files containing some possibly
interesting new features and enhancements.

* performance improvement: internal caching of processing intensive values.
  - archive periods: getting the newscount for every archive period is a   
    quite "expnsive" operation as there can be a lot of these periods. These 
    counts are now cached internally which reduces the rendering time of the 
    archive menu drastically (of course only if there's actually something 
    in the cache). 
  - categories: the categories (and also subcategories) for a news article 
    are now stored in the internal cache, too.
    This reduces the amount of queries which has to be made to display a 
    listview.
  - internal caching for newscounts in category menus with 2 stages: getting 
    the newscounts for categories is also a very expensive operation 
    especially when the categorymenu is a USER_INT object (which is required 
    for the ajax expand/collapse to work).
    Now the newscounts are cached seperately for each category and also in 
    an array containing the complete counts for a category menu in a 
    certain state.

* SQL query improvements: 
  - the "Distinct" subselect for the listquery is now only added if it is 
    actually needed (in case when news are selected by category)
  - removed the "orderby" part from the count query for lists
* added indices for tt_news.datetime and tt_news_cat.parent_category

I used only "datetime" as a key field because this had the best effect in my
installation. In this installation I don't use time information from
enableFields (starttime,endtime) in quries and the archivedate field is
also mostly empty. In other installations where you f.e. make more use of
archivedate or starttime, endtime another mysql index configuration might
give better results.
"better results" means: prevent full table scans (mysql EXPLAIN ....) 
        
* new extmanager options: 
 - useInternalCaching (as the name says, enabled by default), 
 - cachingMode: this determines the cache entries lifetime and if the 
   internal cache from tt_news will be cleared by TYPO3. 
   
   "normal": (default) the cache entries will get the same lifetime as 
   normal pages. The tt_news cache will be cleared when the "clear all 
   caches" button is pressed. 
   
   "lifetime": will set the livetime of cache entries to the given amount of 
   seconds in field "cacheLifetime". The cache table is not cleared 
   when "clear all caches" is clicked. 

   "static": the lifetime of cache entries is set to zero (= unlimited). 
   TYPO3 does not clear the tt_news cache (useful if you clear the cache    
   with an external script or for debugging).
 
 - cacheLifetime: lifetime in seconds of the internal cache entries (used 
   only when cachingMode is "lifetime").
 - writeCachingInfoToDevlog: Which information about internal caching should 
   be written to devlog (extension "devlog" required).
    "disabled": don't write any information about caching to devlog. 
    "cache misses": log only cache misses. 
    "all": log cache misses and cache hits to devlog.
    parsetimeThreshold: Execution time in seconds after which a single 
    function is logged to devlog. 

TypoScript changes:     
----------------------------
* added a lot of TS default variables to setup.txt (These options are not 
  new but before they were only mentioned in the manual and were
  not visible by default in TypoScriptObjectBrowser)
* changed the default TS for date formatting for all "codes" to a consistent 
  format (%d.%m.%Y) and removed the non localized "of" in 
  displaySingle.date_stdWrap.strftime 

* "related news by category" do now have their own TS namespace. Before this 
  the settings for relNewsByCat had to be configured in "displayList." 
  which made it quite unhandy to configure. Now "related news by category" 
  use relNewsByCategory{} which is a copy of the whole plugin.tt_news{} 
  array. This makes it possible to deliver an "out-of-the-box" working 
  default configuration and it gives you more possibilties to adapt the
  output to your needs. 
* added a TS condition to disable the icons in related news by a TS 
  constants switch.
* added a TS condition to directly switch the archiveMode and change the 
  rendering of archiveTitleCObject accordingly by a TS constants switch.  
* changed initialisation of "multipageSingleView". Now 
  useMultiPageSingleView is not activated automatically anymore when 
  maxWordsInSingleView has a non zero value. 
* singleView pagebrowser now uses the same pagebrowser as a normal list view
(with own config array: plugin.tt_news.singleViewPageBrowser)
          
other:
* moved the pagebrowser initialisation/call to a new function:   
  getPagebrowserContent()
* the archivemenu is now able to display dates in the future
* fix for xmlIcon path: now "EXT:" is resolved correctly in the image path
* cleanup: moved all record icons to the new folder res/gfx/
        


You can get the changed version either by checking it out from svn
http://forge.typo3.org/repositories/show/extension-tt_news
or download a t3x from here:
http://rgdata.de/fileadmin/tt_news/T3X_tt_news-3_0_0-dev.t3x

since I didn't had the time until now to update the manual the changelog is
your documentation.

greets
rupert