[TYPO3-core] Fixing system categories

[François Suter]

Hi all,

As part of updating the Core APIs manual, I have been looking into 
system categories, which were introduced in TYPO3 CMS 6.0, with a 
long-pending patch [1] by Fabien to improve the API which helps adding 
categories to any table.

The patch works fine and needs another active member review, but there's 
one issue. The patch needs to be backported to 6.1, because the API was 
broken by the TCA refactoring. However the patch also makes the 
following setting:

TYPO3_CONF_VARS[SYS][defaultCategorizedTables]

work as expected, which it never did before. Now this setting has a 
default value of "pages, tt_content", which means that - if the patch is 
backported as is - the next minor release of 6.1 would have additional 
fields for which the corresponding database columns will probably not 
have been created (as users generally don't expect DB changes in minor 
releases). This will cause SQL errors, and also represents a change in 
UI in a minor release.

My proposal is to backport the patch with the addition of setting 
TYPO3_CONF_VARS[SYS][defaultCategorizedTables] to an empty string for 
6.1. For 6.2 we can leave it as is and advertise system categories in a 
louder way upon 6.2 release.

What do you think?

Cheers

-- 

Francois Suter
Cobweb Development Sarl - http://www.cobweb.ch

[1] http://forge.typo3.org/issues/38972