[blog...]

Quite often I want to set a link to an article I wrote somewhere else on this TYPO3 page. This is no problem, if this article is on a separate page with a unique ID.

But howto set a link to a t3blog article or a tt_news article?

As usual, there are several possibilities:

• add the AOE Linkhandler extension
• add the RTE Generic Record extension
• replace your htmlarea RTE with tinymce_rte with buildin linkhander support

I tried them all. To link a tt_news article is no problem with all of it. But howto link a t3blog-article? This seems to be not so easy if you're using realurl!

[...]

By adding the following Typoscript to your page TSconfig (Page->Edit->Options), tinymce_rte shows you the articles and t3blog-categories when selecting the blog-record folder (in my case ID is 3):

RTE.default {  
     linkhandler {       
       tx_t3blog_post {          
           default { 
              # instead of default you could write the id of the storage folder             
              # id of the Single News Page             
              parameter = 3             
              additionalParams = &tx_t3blog_pi1[blogList][showUidPerma]={field:uid}
              additionalParams.insertData = 1
              select = uid,title as header,hidden
              sorting = crdate desc
           }
       }        

       tx_t3blog_cat {            
           default {                
              parameter = 3                
              additionalParams = &tx_t3blog_pi1[blogList][category]={field:uid}                
              additionalParams.insertData = 1                
              select = uid,catname as header,hidden                
              sorting = crdate desc            
           }
       } 
    }
 }

Unfortunately it is not possible to select the tags from the menu. This is because all tags of one post are stored in the tagClouds field of the tx_t3blog_post table. So still have to add an external link to your page and add e.g. "blog/tags/typo3" if you're using realurl, your blog is located on page "blog" and you want to select the "typo3" tag.

What I like very much in the book is the part "There's more" in every section where the author refers to further information if you want to get deeper in a special topic.

In the chapters 6,7 and 8 the author is creating several extensions to handle multimedia tasks: connect to Amazon S3, get and upload photos from/to Flickr using its API, get a list of videos via the youtube API, extract metadata from OpenOffice documents or converting video formats.

At this point you should really know writing TYPO3 extension otherwise you get lost. And this stresses the lack of good multimedia extensions in TYPO3. So you really need to write your own stuff from time to time. The book really helps you with it because provides ready to use sourcecode for its examples.

Conclusion:

The book covers a very wide area in about 200 pages. It encourage you to embed multimedia content on your website even if you need to write some tiny extensions to meet your requirements.

It's easy to read. If you know TYPO3 extension development already you may profit a lot without getting bored. If you're not so familiar with it you must be aware that this is no "easy-click-manual".

Recently, t3blog changed with 0.8.3 the pagebrowser and requires now to install tx-pagebrowse by Dmitry Dulepov.

Using the new pagebrowser needs to change your CSS settings otherwise it looks like the default and not like you maybe used to have it.

On my German Blog, www.dresden-west.de, the pagebrowser remains English and I now examined why. The solution is the missing language file. It's not comming with the extension itself. But you have to pull it manually:

1. goto the Extension Manager
2. select "Translation handling"
3. select your languages you want to pull (e.g. "German")
4. press "Update from Repository"

Now it should be in German or whatever language you have selected.

After a long time, snowflake updated yesterday the Typo3 t3blog extension. The version number jumped from 0.6.2 to 0.8.0 and immediately after to 0.8.1.

What a step!

Maybe the security vulnerabilities found in t3blog were the reason for submitting the fixed and updated version. 

New is a view for the most read posts. Nice feature, but there seems to be missing some parts. E.g. in the widget selector the title is missing and it only works as pi2-widget if you add the following line to your template:

plugin.tx_t3blog_pi2.views < plugin.tx_t3blog_pi1.views

The page browser changed completely and uses now the extension pagebrowse. Ok, I had to adjust the CSS settings, but now it's working again.

Also "my bug" has been fixed - almost. There remains a problem with the category-tags. I fixed it locally. Let's hope that snowflake keeps maintaining the extension.

In the updated documentation is also a reference to a blog near by me:

http://blog.slub-dresden.de

Update 2010-02-04:

I've added two bug reports to bugs.typo3.org:

• Bug 13425: this reports about the views-widget issues I wrote in this post. And of course I added a patch.
• Bug 13426: another problem with the widget usage. In this case the blogList-widget and only if you use the storagePid. A patch fixes this problem (at least for me).

Update 2010-02-10:

My two patches are accepted by snowflake and will be included in next release: Bug 13425, Bug 1342. Thank you Dominic!