2018

NEW: TYPO3 Testing

2018-11-13 by Christian Kuhn

One part that has been not been documented in a good way was testing. A dedicated chapter about testing in the TYPO3 world now finally puts an end to this: It comes with excessive information on how to set up and run unit, functional and acceptance tests of the core, of extensions and entire projects, together with basic guides on how to write and maintain tests.

As usual, feel free to improve this brand new chapter, add sections we may have missed, adapt details that may not be as precise as they should be and most importantly: Have fun reading i - we hope it comes with some useful information.

NEW: TYPO3 ViewHelper Reference

2018-11-05 by Daniel Siepmann

Done! A complete auto generated ViewHelper Reference is now available at https://docs.typo3.org/typo3cms/ViewHelperReference/Index.html.

Right now, this is auto generated from TYPO3 CMS 9.5.1 source code, but manually rendered and published. The plans are to automate this process and to improve the source code documentation to provide a useful reference in the near future.

The current state was achieved by joined forces. Claus Due developed the generation. Anja Leichsenring did a great job on generating rst files out of the generated information, which then could be handled like any other TYPO3 documentation.

Helping hands were Jan Suchandt and Johannes Seipelt working at 3m5.

TYPO3 Explained and more

2018-10-13 by Christian Kuhn

Our ongoing efforts to integrate, streamline, simplify, modernize and structure the main TYPO3 Core documents reached a next level: The well known "Core API" has been renamed to TYPO3 Explained: This document gained more and more aspects over time and many different ones have been merged into it. This has advantages for everyone:

  • One main entry point: TYPO3 Explained becomes the main document where all main aspects of the TYPO3 Core can be found. You are getting less confused by all the existing other documents and references, TYPO3 Explained is the main thing to look at.
  • It is much easier to maintain only one main repository: We learned that having tons of documentation repositories is rather hard to handle if certain parts of the TYPO3 Core change that need attention on the documentation side. We meanwhile managed to keep the reference documents updated, but other important documents often orphaned and contain outdated information. Having main parts in one place significantly simplifies this process.
  • Better structures: We are aware that especially the API Overview is getting longer and longer. But we're already looking at how this can be moved around and structured in a better way.
  • Less duplication: We already streamlined at least four places where the main filesystem structure of the system has been explained. All in different documents. There are probably more places. This is true for other topics, too. And none of them is the real source of truth. Integrating repositories into TYPO3 Explained gives us the opportunity to merge this stuff around and streamline it once and for all. If we then maintain this stuff, it happens at one place and one place only.

How does all that materialize? Here are some of the works that happened already, with more on the list:

  • The "Security Guide" has been merged as main chapter. It comes with a modernization and overhaul. Go ahead and read or re-read it. It's an important chapter with tons of useful information.
  • To make TYPO3 Explained v9 ready, Susanne Moog added an exhaustive chapter about the new Site Handling and routing. Great work! You really want to read that up if installing new TYPO3 instances or upgrading to TYPO3 v9.
  • The new v9 Meta tag API, Page title API and XML Site map have been documented. Thanks to Richard Haeser for this incredible work!
  • All added / changed properties of v9 are reflected in TYPO3 Explained and the reference documents already. Our workflow to review the Changelog files and merge relevant parts directly works out great. Special thanks to Anja Leichsenring for her continued efforts in this area!
  • TCA colums config reference got an update to better compare user, passthrough and none types with each other.
  • With integration of the saltedpasswords extension as direct core library, the TYPO3 Explained documentation has been extended with a new chapter about password hashing.
  • The Coding Guidelines chapter of TYPO3 Explained got major additions by Sybille Peters. She is active in the documentation area at various places and for instance continuously improves the Contribution workflow document. Thanks a ton for this!
  • We see an increasing number of persons changing details of the documentation all over the place, too many to mention in person. This is great! We try our best to review pull requests in time and merge them. At the moment it seems we're able to cope with it. Keep up the good work and use the "Edit me on github" button in the top right corner, if you spot issues: Go ahead and improve!
  • If you are interested in helping with TYPO3 documentation, you are invited to join the growing list of contributors. See How to Contribute to Official Documentation for more information.

NEW: TYPO3 Sitepackage Tutorial

2018-06-13 by Michael Schams

A teaser screenshot

Today, the TYPO3 Documentation Team published a tutorial that describes the steps required to turn a basic design template into a fully working, mobile-responsive website. [Read more]

"Secret" plans of better documentation rendering

2018-05-31 by Martin Bless

All this is about documentation published at docs.typo3.org.

Sometimes it's difficult to do all the necessary things simultaneously. Informing the public is an easy candidate to be forgotten. Let's try to fix this.

A small number of people met at the end of March 2018 in Düsseldorf. Main goals: Get an overview of the current state and design a strategy for the "new documentation server". Results of that meeting:

  • The documentation team provides an improved and up to date Docker image that will serve as model for the server setup. It will be much smaller, since we drop the capability of reading OpenOffice files and the capability to generate LaTeX and PDF.

Note: As of May 24, 2018 this first step has been achieved.

Find the stripped-down version in the develop-debian-html branch of the t3docs/render-documentation repository. The master branch still has the OpenOffice and LaTeX-Pdf capabilities. I would recommend it for local use.

So development can now continue with the next steps:

  • The TYPO3 GmbH is offering to create a powerful automization solution based on that rendering recipe.
  • Implementing a global "elastic" search will be part of that process. The documentation team contributes the necessary theme and rendering modifications.
  • All rendering of manuals and extension manuals will be triggered based on hooks of their respective repositories. Automatically, instantly, fast, in parallel, with some rule-based automatic transformation of repository names to path names.
  • Any developer can use the rendering chain by calling the proper hooks. These hooks will be developed in the process of creating the server automation.
  • We don't publish PDF files any more.
  • OpenOffice files are not valid documentation any more.
  • We require that projects have a composer.json file. Wherever possible we refer to this file to identify values. This means: The project name, the version number, allowed TYPO3 versions and so on, that appear in the documentation, will be taken from that composer.json file.
  • We will only publish documentation of extensions that are working with the currently maintained TYPO3 versions.

Again: The Docker solution

Coming back to the current Docker solution for documentation rendering - let me take the chance to mention some highlights:

  • improved typoscript highlighter
  • packages (zip-archives) are smaller, due to excluded fonts an improved html font-stack
  • Sphinx caching is enabled: for example, re-render the core ChangeLog in seconds, not 20 minutes or more
  • contains a solution (in docs and in the 'show-shell-commands' code) for the 'mtime' problem. Sphinx-caching is based on filetimes. The git-restore-mtime script presents the solution for repositories.
  • theme is up to date
  • No Piwik calls in offline package
  • YouTube directive works. But not in LaTeX. And that's not needed.
  • The Sphinx extensions that we DO use are loaded by default. No need to mention them in Settings.cfg.
  • Improvements in the toolchain

Keep on finding the words!

Revamped TSconfig Reference

2018-05-02 by Christian Kuhn

We modernized some of the main TYPO3 core documents with more than 100 single commits the last days:

  • The old "Inside TYPO3" document is gone and all information has been merged into the TYPO3 Core API. The Core API document more and more evolves into the TYPO3 core documentation compendium where all conceptual core related information should be looked up in. The term "Core API" will probably change at some point to reflect this, too.
  • The t3tsconfig:start received a major overhaul. This document is one of the most important documents next to the other two references, namely the TypoScript Template Reference and the TCA Reference. The TSconfig Reference didn't receive too much love within the last years, but now it comes with a reworked menu structure, a lot of streamlined information and a simplified property listing with more examples. Various chapters have been moved around between the main core documents to make them more consistent and confined, readers should now find information at places they expect them to be.

Become a TYPO3 Documentation Team member

2018-03-28 by Martin Bless

We are about to re-establish regular, monthly online meetings of the TYPO3 Documentation Team. Please consider becoming a team member. This means: You are willing to participate in the monthly meetings and you are willing to take over a task or another on a regular and not just random basis. You have that feeling? Great! Please get yourself a Slack invite, if you haven't yet, and let us know in the #typo3-documentation channel.

And please, participate in this Doodle and vote for date and time of the first meeting. To just join the meeting you don't need to become a member or vote. Meetings are always open for guests.

Please vote: https://doodle.com/poll/yk89nh4qk4kc3cii

First possible dates are in the range of April 12-16, 2018.

Teaser image of the Doodle survey

New manual: "Tell me something about topic X"

2018-02-02 by Martin Bless

Often questions are centered around topics: How does TYPO3 caching work? How can I improve performance? How to use composer with TYPO3? And often answers are given in blogpostings, slides, videos and so on.

The new manual is the dedicated spot to list and collect those topics. And it's up to you and everybody in the community to come up with explanations, helpful texts and links.

Can we make that manual a success? Yes, we can! Everybody is counting on YOU!

Document restructurings

2018-01-20 by Christian Kuhn

Next to many contributors fixing various documentation parts, we're currently in a bigger restructuring process of main manuals: Various documents are merged into one, the Homepage gets some love to find stuff quicker and other good stuff.

Stay tuned!

Youtube Tutorial - Contribute to docs.typo3.org

2018-01-19 by Mathias Schreiber