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.