If you have to customize a TYPO3 installation for your editors, and you use tt_news, you maybe have had the problem. Your editor gives you a call and let’s you know that he can’t see his just finished news in the frontend. You find out that the record is not hidden, but the problem is that the editor hasn’t had a category selected. Most likely it’s because the categories are on the second tab in the TCEforms. (in some cases where we “misue” tt_news, it’s the only thing that is on the second tab). However, the problem is then that the editor saves the record and forgets to attach a category to it. With this simple statement you can force the editor to select a category:

TCEFORM.tt_news.category.config.minitems = 1

This can be done on pagesTSconfig level but also on userTSconfig, and is quite helpful to save some support calls.

In almost every TYPO3 project of mine, I use this awesomely generic tt_news for displaying news, top offers, etc. In many projects I also have a headline or a breadcrums menu somewhere, telling about the title of the page. tt_news itself offers the possibility to substitute the page title in the <title> tag, however I often use my own title tag rendering, or by using the excellent seo_basics extension :). So the tt_news title is not substituted at all. Therefore I always wrote this little TypoScript snippet that I can use everywhere: more…

Ever since the t3skin arrived, there was this nasty thing that bugged me so much: Some tabs in the TYPO3 Backend weren’t styled at all, and they still had the colors of the classic TYPO3 skin.

As of the nature of TYPO3, an installed skin just overrides the classic skin styles and icons, and it seems like the t3skin author forgot about that. The places where you can see these problems is when selecting a link (Element Browser, Browse Links) and inside the DAM. Apparantly these are the only occurences where the “tabMenu” functions from the template.php file are used, all other places (TCEforms) use the dynTabMenu whic is styled. more…

Everybody started out very simple with TYPO3. In case of my projects, I had to update the copyright year, with all my clients of course. At first, I put everything static in my HTML template, so I had to change the year there. Then I put the static string in TypoScript. Nowadays I enjoy the power of TypoScript that automatically updates the year in the footer for me. This means less client calls at the beginning of the year more…

Today I found out something very nice.

I had the problem that I needed to redefine some labels for alanguage file in an extension. This was client-specific, so it wasn’t suitable for a patch to send to the corresponding extension developer. But I didn’t want to modify the extension files by myself, because in case of an upgrade, the changes would have been erased. So I stumbled upon this nice feature, which worked just fine for my TYPO3 4.0 installation. more…