TYPO3 CMS 6.2 LTS Released

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TYPO3 CMS 6.2 LTS Released

Mit dem Release einer zweiten LTS Version am 25. März 2014 geht Typo3 CMS einen weiteren großen Schritt nach vorne. TYPO3 LTS Versionen bieten den Entwicklern und Betreibern einer Website eine bewissen Planugssicherheit weil sie vom Typo3 Team über mindestens 3 Jahre supportet werden.

Für LTS 6.2 stand das Motto: „Smooth migration“ für eine einfache Migration von der bisherigen LTS 4.5 auf die neue LTS 6.2 im Vordergrund.

Die Wichtigensten Neuerungen:

Long Term Support

Diese Version des TYPO3 CMS wird für mindestens 3 Jahre supportet. Unter diesem Gesichtspunkt steht eine einfache Migration der bisherigen LTS 4.5 auf die neue 6.2 bei der Entwicklung im Vordergrund.

File Abstraction Layer 2.0

Der File Abstraction Layer der mit Typo3 6.0 eingeführt wurde, wurde um weitere Funktionen erweitert. Das Arbeiten mit Dateien um Backend wurde verbessert. Dort gibt es eine neue Drag & Drop upload Funktionalität. Mit einer neuen System extension EXT.filemetadata können Metadatenfelder zu Dateirecords erstellt werden. Dateien die per FTP/SSH gelöscht wurden werden nun richtig erkannt und markiert. Weiterhin bietet FAL 2.0 noch weitere Verbesserungen.

Verbesserte Installation

Das Installtool wurde komplett neugeschrieben und verbesssert um eine einfachere Installation zu ermöglichen. Z.b. werden der nötige Dateibaum nun im installtool selbst angelegt.
Das Installtool erkennt nun selbstständig nötige Einstellungen und ist in der Lage z.b. Notwendige Schritte in einem Rutsch, wie z.b. Migrating the database structure, creating an admin user, cleaning the cache, zu erledigen.

Weiterhin wurde ein Distribution Management eingeführt. Damit kann der Benutzer eine „Distribution“ runterladen und installieren die auf seine Bedürfnisse zugeschnitten ist. Damit wird es einfacher eine komplette funktionsfähige Installation samt Extensions in einem Schritt zu installieren.

Ein weiteres Feature ist der neue CoreUpdater. Damit kann mit einem Klick das Typo3 Core upgradated werden.

Create Mobile Ready Webpages

Responsive Image Rendering ist einer der wichtigen Key Features dieser Version. Typo3 bietet nun den Support für das Rendern der „responsive images“ an. Damit werden nicht einfach nur Bilder im Browser kleiner gerechnet sondern direkt verschiedene Versionen der Bilder über das CMS berechnet.

Mobile Device Preview ermöglicht eine Vorschau der Darstellung der Mobilen Website im Backend.

Benutzerzufriedenheit

Editoren werden nicht mehr an die alten Versionen zurückdenken. Das Backend wurde überarbeitet und bietet nun „smoother style, more spacing and less distraction“.

Weitere Wichtige Veränderungen aus dem Original Release:

Integrators will love it

Site integrators and TypoScript gurus have plenty of new features to get the most out of the latest release.

  • Backend Layout Data Providers: With this, backend layouts are no longer limited to live in the database table „backend_layout“ but can also be stored in files (making them easier to deploy and share). Extensions that provide „Theming“ to TYPO3 (i.e. EXT:themes) will make very good use of it soon!
  • Users of the categorization system (introduced in 6.0) can now easily create menus of pages or content elements from the category tree. Either through TypoScript (in HMENU) or simply by allowing the editor to create this new menu type directly.
  • Several new conditions were added and improved to make the templates more flexible (i.e. applicationContext, IP=devIP).
  • TypoScript with FAL (files) also got plenty of improvements: File metadata are accessible through registers in file links, some improvements in the FILES cObject, rendering of the translations of meta data in frontend and more.
  • TYPO3 now only sets a frontend user cookie (fe_session) if there is session data or the user is logged in. This minimizes traffic, allows better optimization of reverse proxies (i.e. varnish). It also makes the setting „dontSetCookie“ obsolete.

Administrators will work with pleasure

  • Install Tool: new features like „Check for broken Extensions“, „Core Updater“, „Clear all caches“.
  • Documentation: A shiny new Documentation Module brings a whole new era of TYPO3 documentation in a central place. The whole core is now documented using the reStructured syntax, and all Core Documents were already converted to this new format. Extension authors are encouraged to migrate existing OpenOffice manuals to this new and more flexible format.
  • Scheduler: Better organization in the Scheduler with task groups and task descriptions
  • Translations: Support for custom translation servers. See documentation.
  • Permissions: Admins can now restrict the visibility categories for a backend users, a feature known from tt_news. The admin can also control the visibility of modules in the backend. Part of FAL, fine grained file permission which were previously only available through UserTS configuration can be configured directly in the BE users and groups.
  • OpenID: A new wizard to add OpenID to backend user was created.
  • Caching Groups: Introduced the concept of „caching groups“. The reworked cache menu (the yellow flash on top of your backend) now has clearer names and permissions. The most used flush option is „Flush frontend caches“, which will remove all page related caches (thus making TYPO3 re-render the content). Second is the newly introduced „Flush general caches“ which includes the frontend caches, but also extension specific caches. Now there is (by default) no way to clear the „System (core) caches“. These core caches usually don’t need to be cleared on a production system, because their content only changes when installing or removing extensions – where they are automatically flushed. In order to still be able to flush these caches through the backend (i.e. on a development instance), you can use this TSconfig for your user: options.clearCache.system = 1.

Developers will be beaming with joy

The TYPO3 CMS is a vivid eco-system which is already embedded in a multitude of scenarios. With 6.2 we wanted to make sure that developers could use the most modern in PHP development. TYPO3 CMS is now part of a larger PHP eco-system by introducing the Package Management from TYPO3 Flow.

Introducing the concept of Package Management brings interoperability with the whole world of Composer based PHP libraries and TYPO3 Flow packages to the TYPO3 CMS eco-system. The Package Management implements PSR-0 auto-loading, supports Vendor Namespaces and allows TYPO3 CMS installations to load and make use of native TYPO3 Flow packages. On top of that, it is now possible to natively load Composer based libraries. This means that TYPO3 CMS 6.2 provides a base for creating PHP applications of the future. The feature-set of the Package Management will be further improved in the next releases of TYPO3 CMS.

Other notable developer changes:

  • Our Logger is now fully PSR-3 compliant
  • Backported ApplicationContext from TYPO3 Flow. See documentation.
  • Native support for prepared statements through mysqli and the TYPO3_DB API
  • The category system allows multiple category fields per table

Extbase

  • now has recursive validation, just like in Flow
  • Extbase’s persistence got much faster by introducing a query building cache layer and support for prepared statements
  • Support for the @inject syntax in Extbase classes

Updated third party components

  • jQuery updated to 1.11.0
  • RequireJS updated to 2.10
  • SwiftMailer updated to 5.0.3
  • ExtJS upgraded from 3.4.0 to 3.4.1.1
  • normalize.css updated to 3.0.0

Security specialists will nod with satisfaction

For the TYPO3 developers, security has a very high value. Our Security Team consists of specialists who are constantly advocating about best practices amongst the Team. This high awareness of Security is reflected by TYPO3 being one of the most secure CMS around.

We enhanced security in this latest release: saltedpassword is now used by default for the Install Tool and all backend users. No more insecure hashes in the database! Also using it for frontend users is highly encouraged and possible since TYPO3 4.3. We’ve implemented CSRF protection throughout the whole TYPO3 Backend, even in Ajax calls. A new click-jacking protection minimizes the risk of users being lured into performing backend actions which they are not wanting to do. cookieHttpOnly is now enabled by default.

Core enthusiasts will scream in delight

The core is now cleaner and more stable than ever before. Of course we did plenty of code cleanups, removing obsolete code, refactoring difficult to fix areas, improving inline documentation and helping getting the most out of today’s IDEs (i.e code completion). To improve code stability, we created a new framework for functional tests, to complete our already available unit tests. We now have over 6.400 unit tests and 600 functional tests to cover a huge portion of the core code. As we add new features and fixes, more tests will be created, ensuring that a once fixed bug will never show up again. These tests are run after every change merged (through the amazing service provided by Travis CI), so that the whole team is always aware if something is broken to quickly work on a fix.