[TYPO3-core] [TYPO3-dev] Announcing TYPO3 4.2 Alpha 2

[Ingo Renner]

The core team is proud to announce the second Alpha of TYPO3 version 4.2.

So what's new?

Community involvement

First of all this is the first release of TYPO3 since the core 
development mailinglist has been opened for public write access. The 
core team likes to thank all those who have been actively contributing 
to improve TYPO3 since then. We're stunned about the huge success of the 
open core development mailinglist and the many contributions!

Backend improvements

This version ships with the initial work of the "Cleaner backend" 
project which consists of several major parts. In the first step the 
backend was freed from the frames which have been replaced by div 
containers and a single iframe. A special thanks goes to Dirk Jesse from 
the YAML CSS Framework project for helping out here! To make the former 
top frame free for new tasks the secondary options in TCEforms now 
unfold directly at their parent input fields. After that was 
accomplished it was now possible to move other elements to newly won 
space in the new toolbar at the top. For now only the workspace selector 
has moved, but other elements will follow.
Another major task was the restyling of TCEforms to always have the 
buttons to save a document in sight at the top of the editing area.
You test the new backend by accessing it through typo3/backend.php.

Installer 2

The installer version 2 has been added to this release to make it easy 
to test the new version. This new installer is a complete rewrite of the 
old one by Thomas Hempel, it's now devided into two parts, the installer 
itself and a setup moduel which is accessible from the backend. When 
doing a new install you'll be prompted whether you want to use the old 
or the new installer. At the current state you can use the new installer 
in 1-2-3 mode only and then refine your settings from within the backend.

T3Editor

Also completely new in this version is the so called t3editor by Tobias 
Liebig which makes it possible to highlight TypoScript when editing 
TypoScript templates in the Web->Template module.

Linking to records using the RTE

A feature which was partly available in 4.1 already but unusable because 
of a typo is now fully implemented. Extensions can now link to records 
like tt_news items directly using a RTE wizard. This will not work out 
of the boy though as it needs support from the extensions which need to 
handle the rendering in the frontend.

More improvements to the RTE

Stanislas Rolland is back from his long holiday trip and has since kept 
on working on rtehtmlarea. He added several features to the RTE like 
making it possible to extend the RTE with own plugins. Other then that 
there seems to be an uncountable amunt of bugfixes which are always very 
much welcomed.

Improvements for the RTE

RTEmagic images are now duplicated when records are copied/versioned in 
tcemain. This is a long awaited feature that solves the bug that RTE 
magic images shared between two records would result in both 
disappearing if the one was deleted. Therefore this is also an important 
fix for Workspaces.

New language

The Galician language was added so that localizations can be downloaded 
as they become available from the translators. TYPO3 can now be 
translated into 49 languages.

Third party libraries

TYPO3 4.2alpha2 comes with updated javascript libraries, we now ship 
with prototype 1.6.0 and script.aculo.us 1.8.0. Libraries to minfy 
javascript and prevent cross site scripting (XSS) attacks have been 
added, too.

Raised minimum PHP version requirement

To run TYPO3 4.2alpha2 you need to have at least PHP 5.2. This move was 
necessary to use features introduced since PHP 5.0.

As always

Other then the highlighted features we also packed tons of bug fixes, 
performance improvements, enthusiasm, and love into this release.

Next steps to 4.2

Please test this Alpha as much as possible, especially the new features 
from alpha1 and those described above! If you're e.g. using one of the 
new features in a project of yours already and discover bugs, please 
report them immediately to http://bugs.typo3.org/!

During the next weeks, we will release one more Alpha before locking 
down the development of new features. We will then continue with Beta 
releases which are only meant for bug fixes before turning to Release 
Candidates and the final version of TYPO3 4.2. This means that you can 
expect the final version to be ready around the end of January '08.

For a detailed overview of the features planned for 4.2 and their 
progress, have a look at the 4.2 Development wiki page, the bugtracker, 
and the ChangeLog.

You can download the packages at http://typo3.org/download/packages/.

MD5 Sums:
52a869cd8aac9eb2e6fa8219061360ba dummy-4.2.0alpha2.tar.gz
089ef3683d5d50c963b26a42ba8686d6 dummy-4.2.0alpha2.zip
83b8dd66a1127650c12ee5ae2ef5350a typo3_src-4.2.0alpha2.tar.gz
8906c7115b6187ac99a44b0446deea5d typo3_src-4.2.0alpha2.zip
b36f1cbab564eabf873d948eb3307d2c typo3_src+dummy-4.2.0alpha2.zip

cheers
Ingo

-- 
Ingo Renner
TYPO3 Core Developer, Release Manager TYPO3 4.2