Release of TYPO3 4.4beta2

By: Benjamin Mack

Today, the TYPO3 community released the second beta of the upcoming version 4.4 of TYPO3. There is already a feature freeze in place since beta1, thus the last weeks have been all about bugfixing - over 80 changes were made during the development. Additionally, the last few features have finally made its way into the TYPO3 Core.

1-2-3 Installer with DBAL enabled

The new installer that was included in the last beta is easily adjustable, and thus our DBAL team made it possible that you can now download 4.4 beta2 and set up a new installation on any supported DBMS without manually configuring anything for that, DBAL takes care of the rest. There is a dropdown when entering the server data that shows all DBMS your server supports.

Reorganized CSS Files in the Backend

Although splitting up the CSS files into structural and visual parts seems like a trivial thing to do, it was a major and important task, but it's finally included. This restructuring process also paves the way to modify the TYPO3 Backend in a way that the CSS is kept manageable. Plus, you can now develop your own skins in a way that has never been easier.

Note: If you upgrade from a previous installation, make sure to delete all typo3conf/temp_*.php files. Otherwise you'll see the infamous "naked skin" without any styling and colors.

CSS and Javascript Concatenator and Compressor

While reorganizing the CSS files in the TYPO3 Backend, it was clear that if all CSS rules are split up in separate files the browser would include dozens of CSS files for one request, resulting in more than one hundred HTTP request for loading the TYPO3 Backend. A generic solution was developed and included in beta2. All CSS files are now merged together, and compressed afterwards, if compression in your TYPO3 installation is enabled.

For all Developers: A Backend Debug Bar

During fixing one major bug in the TYPO3 Backend, that is how to deal with error messages in the TYPO3 backend frameset, the idea came up to show certain debug information in a separate panel, similar to how Firebug does it for Firefox. If an error occurs and TYPO3 has debug information enabled, developers and administrators now see detailed information in a separate part of the TYPO3 Backend.

Updated Fluid and Extbase versions

Extbase, the bridge for plugins to TYPO3 v5, has been updated to support "Single Table Inheritance". This is a breaking change however. In TYPO3 4.3, Extbase made a "best guess" for the table name if it was not the lowercased class name (simply by crawling the class hierarchy upwards trying to find a mapping rule or table). This "magic" was removed because It was very hard to understand what was happening; especially if there was an error. This behaviour has now changed and the recordType and the tableName are now defined through TypoScript. See the typo3.projecty.typo3v4mvc mailing list for more details on this topic.

Get your package

You can grab one of the following files from the download page.

MD5 checksums:

a1744224832ed5394dba33a2a0ee9fda  dummy-4.4.0beta2.tar.gz
88b802b44ccb93278b4725e4e367e87f  dummy-4.4.0beta2.zip
de188bc93e9a92cca458d5d6f794cd01  typo3_src-4.4.0beta2.tar.gz
57e63a860577d48a9c04eb19bc72f5f9  typo3_src-4.4.0beta2.zip
234bbbf5cebf586979ebf41a5be535d1  typo3_src+dummy-4.4.0beta2.zip

What's next?

We still have a lot of bugs to fix, and of course, the whole package should be tested. As usual: Be sure to report every single bug on bugs.typo3.org. The final release of TYPO3 4.4.0 is scheduled for June 22nd, 2010.

Benjamin Mack
-- Release Manager TYPO3 4.4