[TYPO3-core] TemplaVoila ... what to do with it?

[JoH asenau]

>> My hope - of course - is that it will be maintained as long as all of
>> its features are not provided by the Core. I know many people don't like
>> TV, in particular because of the way is stores relations (in XML
>> structures) - which is indeed bad, but I think it leads those some
>> people to not know properly the feature set of TV. I feel recent debates
>> mostly focused on BE layouts (now it TYPO3 Core) and flexible content
>> elements (still not part of Core, but apparently provided by
>> "gridelements", which I didn't test). That's too short. For example, one
>
> I agree that BE layouts allow a lot and I am now using gridelements (in
> fact gridelements2) on 1-2 new websites, just to learn and see "how it
> is". I must say I like it a lot but I must admit as well that this
> changes quite a lot in the way you prepare your FCEs and I'm too new to
> gridelements2 (yet) to really judge but as it is still a very young
> project, it lacks a proper documentation

Maybe anyone comparing TemplaVoila, Gridelements and Fluidcontent should 
take a look at this comparison chart, since it explains the differences 
quite detailed:

http://bit.ly/Z5Z7WX

Gridelements are not meant to be a full replacement for every kind of 
individual TV-FCEs.
They just provide backend layouts for content elements, thus making it 
possible to have structured container elements, that can be nested as well.

Anything else they provide for the backend has nothing to do with 
layouts or templating but with improvements of the backend UI.

If you want to test all the available features currently 2.0 is not the 
way to go, since it is in alpha state and does not provide the full 
feature set of 1.4 yet. (i.e. the drag in wizard is still missing since 
the icon that triggered it has been removed in 6.0)

BTW: What exactly did you miss in the current PDF manual - we thought it 
to be quite satisfying for a start with gridelements?

 > and as such, starting to use it
> as a "TYPO3 integrator" is currently (from my POV) much more challenging
> that using TV. But again, the project is still pretty young and having
> worked with TV for years, it's just normal that using another technology
> for templating FCEs is more challenging than using point-and-click in a
> nice Backend editor.
>
>> feature that we use a lot is references. It exists in the Core as
>> "Insert records", but TV usability is IMO far superior in this case.
>
> +1!

This is just one of the UI improvements provided by Gridelements: Have 
properly normalized references based on "Insert Records" but with the 
same usability as you know it from TV: Copy elements into the clipboard 
and insert them as references wherever you like.
Even better: You can use references to pages additional to single 
content elements and in both cases you will see the referenced content 
within the "Insert Records" example content.

But to get back to Tolleiv's original question:

I would like to see the best of all the different approaches to 
templating and structured content merged in the TYPO3 core. Normalized 
structures and UI improvements of Gridelements combined with the 
flexibility and the modern code patterns of fluidcontent together with 
the mapping capabilities of TV or maybe Jetts IMHO would be a real 
killer app.

If we could reach that goal, we would finally get "the" TYPO3 structured 
content and templating way which would make any of the extensions it has 
been based on obsolete.

Just my 2 cents

Joey

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