In the past months, I have been working in the background on the website and extensions. About time to write about it!
Working on the website
I like the freedom that my very own website gives me. The design can be a bit whimsical and playful. I have complete control over my content. The risk of some wacky billionaire buying me up is pretty low (call me, Elon!).
And there are always areas to tinker with.
The list views
The list views for news and tutorials are no longer rendered in multiple columns, which turned out to be too confusing. Also, the news list now shows some pretty preview images.
Frontend
- The focus styles on the website have been improved. To prevent them from being cut off by overflow: hidden in TYPO3 content elements, I have changed my styles for fluid_styled_content from Floats to Flexbox (and reorganized them).
Also, articles are no longer linked twice (image and headline), but can now be focused on as a whole. - jQuery has become superfluous and is no longer loaded. The last plugin with this dependency was magnific-popup. It was adequately replaced with simplelightbox. Every byte is sacred!
Frontend build stuff
- Upgrade to gulp 4, Yarn 3 und Dart Sass.
- The SCSS-Partials are now checked with Stylelint.
- I added BackstopJS for Visual Regression Testing.
Tutorial reviews
I checked my existing tutorials for compatibility with TYPO3 v11 and marked them accordingly. Some topics needed more work.
How to add custom database fields in TYPO3? Back in 2016, I had intentionally shown this by extending page properties. The reason: to support localized pages, you needed to extend not one but two database tables: pages and pages_language_overlay. When the latter table was deprecated with TYPO3 v9, I added some hints in the tutorial. By now, the guide is completely cleaned up. I have archived the old version in the Wayback Machine and added a link to it.
The first tutorial about configuring individual email templates in the Form Framework is based on TYPO3 v8. As Version 10 provides the new Fluid Emails, I created an up-to-date article about it. This is already the fifth article about EXT:form. But don't worry about me, I also have other interests. 😅
Human-readable anchors for content elements
In the past, I had written news articles about the extension "content_slug" only when major new features were introduced. I had established the compatibility with TYPO3 v11 (and the preceding sprint releases) without further announcement.
On GitHub there are still issues waiting for my time and attention.
Practical examples of the TYPO3 Form Framework
In "form_examples" there were several cleanups. On GitHub, a separate, compatible branch for each TYPO3 version exists. For versions 10 and 11, I have switched to FluidEmail.
"Jump to" links in Google SERPS
The extension "seo_tableofcontents" (shipping a SEO-optimized menu content element) is compatible with TYPO3 v11 and content_slug 2.x.
Sitepackage starter kit
I have provided a templating starter kit for all TYPO3 versions since 6.2. Each of these basetemplates (or Sitepackages) contains the latest Typoscript configurations and template changes. From time to time I added useful settings, like configuration for HTTP security headers. There were no significant changes from TYPO3 v10 to v11 , so basetemplate10 can still be used.
I still have to decide whether I will continue this in the future altogether. After all, the useful Sitepackage Builder has been around for quite some time. If so, I certainly would revise some areas more significantly for version 12.