Linux for Designers

The first TYPO3 User eXperience Week is over. A lot of interesting projects that will improve the usability of TYPO3 will come. I wish i could be there
A short summery can be found at the TYPO3 news website.

The Gnome Color Management project has now it's own website. GNOME Color Manager is a session framework for the GNOME desktop environment that makes it easy to manage, install and generate color profiles. They integrated ArgyllCMS for calibrating devices. A lot of the progress and the details can be found on Richard Hughes blog too.

I wrote some posts about simple color calibration, of course there are color management systems available for Linux too. One of them is the open source color management system Argyll CMS. dispcalGUI is a GUI frontend for several utilities (specifically dispcal, dispread, colprof and dispwin) of it. Using all together it allows you to calibrate and profile your display using a measurement device (of course Argyll CMS did a lot more).

Last week i wrote a post about updates of the CMS Typo3 4.2x and 4.1x to fix security issues and problems of the Backend with Firefox 3. Not any Typo3 installation can be updated in time and i found a workaround how to use the backend of older Typo3 versions with Firefox 3:
* Login at the Typo3 Backend
* At the section "Web" klick on module "Page"
* The backend bug appears in FF3 - the first frame is missing
* press now the back button of FF3
* use now your Typo3 in the normal way

The final of Typo3 4.2 is released today. At area42 we will start any new Typo3 project with it because this new stable brunch comes with over 650 improvements and a cool new backend interface for a much better usability! Typo3 4.2 requires now PHP 5.2 or higher. Try it out its a great step forward! If you find a bug submit it on the bug tracker.

Together with Sebastian Böttger from Cross Content Media here at area42 we started a month ago the tyClipse project which aimed a TYPO3 Enterprise Development solution on Eclipse.
Now we joined our forces with the FLOW3DE project to create together a bigger solution for TYPO3 4, TYPO3 5 and the new Framework FLOW3: DEV₃
Sebastian will present this project at the TYPO3 Developer Days 2008 (T3DD08) too.

At the moment a lot of people are at the T3Board and having there a lot of fun. Last evening one big event of the party there was the publishing of the release candidate 2 of the content management system Typo3 4.2.
Besides new features and more API hooks this version brings a much cleaner backend interface to all users . Check out the Twitter channel of the T3board too. As i read a bug auction started and the developers are on heavy coding there for free beer

...i was very busy the last days. I had a talk at the T3AK'08 and at area42 i have to finish SweeTS 1.20. SweeTS is a development enviroment for TypoScript and a external TypoScript editor. TypoScript is the template language of the content management system (CMS) TYPO3.
Besides that i launched the tyClipse project that will bring TYPO3 and TypoScript development to Eclipse.

I updated the instructions about "Using SweeTS" at the bottom of the SweeTS webpage. It contains now helpful informations about getting off the template caching and how to get *.ts files edited in the backend of Typo3.

To get *.ts files edited in the backend of Typo3 you must allow editing of files and add this line to your "typo3conf/localconf.php"

$TYPO3_CONF_VARS['SYS']['textfile_ext'] = 'txt,html,htm,css,inc,php,php3,tmpl,js,sql,ts';

Add this into your user TSconfig field in the backend at Tools > Useradmin:

admPanel.override.tsdebug.forceTemplateParsing = 1

So while you are logged in into the backend (may over the browser sidebar) you don't have
to clear the cache.
These and other new hints will improve your workflow so much - check it out!

After last year the conference of the content management system Drupal, the DrupalCon, took place in Spain, this year the Drupal Association announced it for 2008 in Boston.