[TYPO3-ttnews] Feedback on EXT:news

[Thomas Kowtsch]

Hi Georg,

On 22.03.2012 07:12, Georg Ringer wrote:
> Am 21.03.2012 20:37, schrieb Thomas Kowtsch:
>> It's really worth the effort; I finished migrating an install with
>> multiple different users, pages and news types some weeks ago. I'ts
>> really awesome (once you understood fluid B-)
> Great to hear that. Wanna take some minutes to write somewhere what you
> like most about EXT:news, what is missing in your eyes for
> integrators/developers/editors and what the next steps should be? This
> would be awesome!

Yep, let's go!

What I liked most when starting to play with news that it did exactly 
what was promised: No hidden features to investigate, no need to 
"scratch the left ear with the right foot" to get some result - 
everything goes straight forward and clear.
In addition, the default templates allow fluid-newbies to learn easily 
how to work with partials, viewhelpers, ...
For users, it's easy to switch over - I did not even needed to create a 
one-page user "manual" - esp. the possibility to edit each attached 
image as one data set gave a "Wow!" (just remember the days when trying 
to find the correct line in the caption field for a certain image... ;-)

But of course some things remain open - some of them because news is too 
new, some are driven by some special use cases.

1) news is hard to find anywhere: The name is too similar compared to 
tt_news, so it's hard to find news even in the TER, not counting 
searches in the web or in a forum.

2) Documentation could benefit from a clearer structure: The manual 
holds some short examples, but once the extension is uploaded to TER, 
these are outdated and newer one can be found in the wiki. Maybe you 
should simply remove them from the manual until they get less volatile?

3) news has too few publicity to gather new ideas: tt_news was used as 
"one fits all"-extension, almost everything you could imagine was done 
with it. There are so many publications, code snippets, additional 
extensions, ... out there. This what's still missing - all of us need to 
spread the word of ext:news.

4) I'm still missing a news type "File". Today, presenting new 
publications such as cheat sheets or PDF ebooks directly for download 
need to use the type "External Link" (same as in tt_news). But it's 
clumsy to add the URL manually and to add eventually the same file as 
media element.

Personally, I believe the most important step for the next time is to 
get more and more installations to get more user feedback, new extension 
that integrate news where required - all of this aiming to get a better 
understanding of what the "other" people outside want to have and where 
their problems are. Early adopters usually are more addicted to 
technology :-)

I think there are still some more things to say, but I want to give 
other people also a chance to say "Thank you!"

Thomas