[blog...]

PREVIEW

Because of my last review about the TYPO3 4.3 Multimedia Cookbook, Packt Publishing sent me their new book TYPO3 4.2 E-Commerce.

Authors of this book are Inese Liberte and Edgars Karsons from Latvia. Both are introduced as TYPO3 user and developer with very good knowledge in TYPO3. The authors own the website company Netberries Ltd.

The title of the book reveals already the TYPO3 version the authors used for the examples: 4.2.8. Now we have 4.4.2 but the details about installation of TYPO3 and the shop-extensions are still up-to-date.

The first two chapter describe a basic TYPO3 setup, the installation of extensions, the template concept and some TypoScript. You may skip these chapters if you know TYPO3 very well.

Chapter 3 introduces on two pages the common e-commerce extensions tt_products, extendedshop and commerce. The major part of this chapter is dedicated to payment add-ins but only Paypal is described in detail. At the end of this chapter I was really astonished to find three pages of screenshots about upgrading TYPO3 extensions. Why isn't this covered in the first two chapters?

Surprise, surprise. In Chapter 4 the authors selected tt_products as e-Commerce extension for all further examples. But they don't explain their decision, don't help you with the installation and don't explain why tt_products depends on other extensions (tsparser, table and div2007). For a step-by-step guide this is really bad.

Chapter 4 starts with a description of a new extension wil_importcsv to import your shop-data from CSV files. This is of course useful, but shouldn't we first setup the shop itself? The authors do this afterwards. So you have to step back from page 69 to 65 to understand the page tree of the demo shop. Unfortunately the page IDs are not shown - but used on page 75. It doesn't help - you have to do your first steps of your own. Some tips about template management are very useful.