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

[Ingo Renner]

Dear TYPO3 users,

The core team is proud to announce the second Beta of TYPO3 version 4.2. 
As we had a feature freeze with the release of Beta 1 earlier this 
month, this Beta is entirely a bug fix and minor improvements release.

So what has changed?

Cleaner Backend Project

The new editor toolbar is now added to nearly every core backend module 
making the backend look even more consistent. Tabs as in the page 
properties were also introduced for content elements, frontend users, 
frontend usergroups, backend users, backend usergroups, and TypoScript 
templates so that fields are now grouped and can be found faster. The 
new shortcut menu got a small help text when there are not shortcuts 
added yet.

One more thing(s)

This release features our one more thing for TYPO3 4.2. The Web Access 
module has gained AJAX support. When setting permissions for users or 
groups you can now directly click the setting you want to change to 
toggle between allowed and disallowed in the permissions matrix. Give it 
a try!

The "Open Documents" extension listing all backend forms you've 
currently opened, has seen another bunch of improvements under the hood; 
yet some necessary CSS changes have not yet gone in, so test it, but 
don't expect it to look good yet!

The TypoScript editor with highlighting and all sorts of features which 
make editing a breeze has been fixed to work correctly in Firefox 2 now. 
However, Internet Explorer support seems to be broken right now, but the 
author Tobias Liebig is already working on a fix. If you notice any bugs 
with T3Editor on Firefox in this release, don't hesitate to report the 
bug either on the dev mailinglist or in the bugtracker.

A small feature which comes in handy when you're using IRRE to manage 
your data collections is the possibility to hide tables from the "New 
record" link in the backend by means of the TSConfig option 
"mod.web_list.deniedNewTables", so you can finally ensure that IRRE 
child tables are only created and edited from within their parent record.

Negative Timestamps

One thing those of you who are born before the date of 01/01/1970 will 
especially appreciate is that you will now be able to save your birth 
date in date/datetime fields in backend forms. This was actually an 
issue with PHP on some operating systems which was fixed in PHP 5.1. 
TYPO3 now makes use of the fixed issues and can now internally handle 
"negative timestamps" which makes it possibe to save dates starting from 
1902 (still with an upper limit of year 2038).

Linking across domains in a tree

When you have more than one domain in your tree, like www.example.com 
and other.example.com a link from the former to the later would result 
in awrong link with the wrong domain. This issue was resolved and an 
updated version of EXT:realurl making use of that should be available 
soon, too.

Performance improvements

In an attempt to clean up the important library t3lib_div some slow PHP 
functions were replaced by faster ones.

Bugfixes

A lot of minor bugfixes were added, especially concerning CSS styling 
issues and JavaScript errors. Nested *_INT TypoScript objects were not 
woking, this has been fixed. All other fixes are rather minor and can be 
looked up in the ChangeLog.

Reminder: Raised minimum PHP version requirement

To run TYPO3 4.2beta2 you need to have at least PHP 5.2 [1]. This move 
was necessary to use PHP features introduced since PHP 5.0.

As always

Other then the highlighted bug fixes, performance improvements, and 
enthusiasm we again put lots of love into this release. A special thanks 
for the help in making this release what it is goes to the core team and 
all engaged community developers.

Next steps to 4.2

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

Due to some bigger issues with broken handling of client/server timezone 
calculation that have poped up meanwhile we will need to have a third 
beta release to get everything fixed and tested properly to keep our 
high quality standards. Beta3 is expexted within the next one or two 
weeks, after that we want to start release candidate phase so that the 
new target for a final release of TYPO3 4.2 is now mid to end of March.

For a detailed overview of the features planned for 4.2 and their 
progress, have a look at the 4.2 Development wiki page [2], the 
bugtracker [3], and the ChangeLog [4].

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

MD5 Sums:
fde517d97fde0f030a69846ec44c3d31  dummy-4.2.0beta2a.tar.gz
eb11f8e5d7c38fad0caebf2bbdac8b5e  dummy-4.2.0beta2a.zip
624e18ffc9f5a1c700e13339ba884094  typo3_src-4.2.0beta2a.tar.gz
1e4c8ff60a3090ad4a97e4014f4a48ff  typo3_src-4.2.0beta2a.zip
c660088bcdd777adb987a62dfb14050d  typo3_src+dummy-4.2.0beta2a.zip


cheers
Ingo

[1] http://buzz.typo3.org/people/stucki/article/leaving-php4-behind/
[2] http://wiki.typo3.org/index.php/4.2_Development
[3] http://bugs.typo3.org/
[4] 
http://typo3.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/typo3/TYPO3core/branches/TYPO3_4-2/ChangeLog?revision=3272&view=markup

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