[TYPO3-core] [TYPO3-dev] Announcing TYPO3 4.2 Beta 3

[Ingo Renner]

Dear TYPO3 users,

The core team is proud to announce the third Beta of TYPO3 version 4.2. 
After the previous two Beta versions this Beta is mostly a bug fix and 
minor improvements release, too. However there are some developer and 
administrator related changes.

So what has changed?

Cleaner Backend Project

The new editor toolbar was added to some more moduls leaving only a few 
without it. Another smaller usability improvement includes the now 
persistently visible author and author email fields in the page properties.

Administrator relevant changes

Changes have been made to better support completely utf-8 based systems 
and the migration to utf-8 by also improving the SQL parser engine. 
Commandline scripts should now work on Windows, too. A new small feature 
was introduced to display a HTML file during maintenance and page 
unavailable handling was improved.

Developer relevant changes

An option was introduced to completely turn off the no_cache parameter, 
although this option is off by default it is likely that is will get 
enabled by default with TYPO3 4.4 or 4.5, please make sure you use 
proper caching in your extensions. A new input field type is available 
in TCEforms, you can now use a directory picker. New hooks are available 
in tslib_content, post processing for frontend editing, and after 
generated pages are written to the cache so that you can replace global 
marker like a user's username here.

Bugfixes

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 and beta 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/!

The next release will be release candidate 1. RC1 is expexted within the 
next one or two weeks so that the target for a final release of TYPO3 
4.2 stays 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:
9d98bf0576695ac86f8eb662791c5605  dummy-4.2.0beta3.tar.gz
ce5ce68da267fd919aeae79bd61e5e05  dummy-4.2.0beta3.zip
0a13514f982134c99a08cb6cc8dc62a0  typo3_src-4.2.0beta3.tar.gz
35c9c5db920b701d3305b16f80c3cb70  typo3_src-4.2.0beta3.zip
14deeadbd14a248ab65a30359f24960c  typo3_src+dummy-4.2.0beta3.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=3381&view=markup


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