I've worked with Phabrictor, GitHub, Bitbucket and GitLab in the past. GitHub itself has a very clean process for forks and many people seem to be fine with them. I myself wasn't aware of some issues for a very long time.

But a TYPO3 community member recently contacted me because of a so-called “fork” I had created which changed my mind. That revealed a big issue to me, followed by some smaller issues.

I share this, so you become aware and can judge for yourself whether those issues apply for you as well. And I share this, so you can decide to find other ways in case you develop software like Forgejo.

I attend this year's Web Camp Venlo. And usually I don't publish recaps any more. But this year felt special to me and there was so much going on that I need to write that down and share the experience with everyone out there.

We always use composer to manage our TYPO3 (and other) PHP projects. I'll share our own best practices that come along by using composer for TYPO3 projects.

I've just made two updates from TYPO3 v8 to 11 LTS. As well as some updates from 11 LTS to 12 LTS. This post will be an explanation of how I did those updates in order to share my experience with you.

We have a custom TYPO3 Backend module which is a small web application. We wrote the web application using TypeScript. But we need to make use of some TYPO3 JavaScript APIs which do not expose types for TypeScript. I'll be going to explain how to set up TypeScript for modules not providing those types. This is a general approach, not specific to TYPO3.

Many people, including myself, prefer the already known solutions. We tend to get things done fast by not checking all the possible solutions out there. Checking all solutions for a new problem can be very time-consuming, and we would need to learn a new solution. We therefore often tend to keep the existing solutions as long as possible.

I share my own experience with one situation where I had to learn that it can be the other way around. I guess we always should at least have a look at other solutions. We still can decide to stick to our old solution.

We do website upgrades from time to time, e.g. upgrade from TYPO3 version 10 to version 11. This involves some manual tasks, and you need to verify that everything works as expected prior promising the customer you're done.

There are some tools out there to help you get the job done. Still I sometimes prefer a very basic Unix command to get the job of comparison done.

Read on how I crawl the two site versions in order to compare them.

I sometimes have a list of URLs and want to check their status code. One use case are updates of a TYPO3 system where I want to check that all the detail pages (e.g. products, authors, etc.) are working. The web server would return a 200 response in case everything is fine, and a 500 in case of issues.

This short code snippet will check a list of URLs from a file and return all the URLs with their status code. That way you can extend the snippet to filter for 500 status codes and retrieve a filtered list of broken URLs.

TYPO3 developers are often faced with the same requirement: Import data into TYPO3. TYPO3 itself offers many ways to import data into the system. The DataHandler (TCE) or Extbase might come to your mind, as well as plain Doctrine DBAL queries.

This post will explain my views on each of the options and their pros and cons. I don't consider any of them the general solution, but the pros and cons might help you find the one suiting your current use case best.

I'm a professional web developer doing PHP with TYPO3 since 2012. This post covers my journey from the beginning, how I've become a web developer and how I've become a TYPO3 developer and integrator. I'll also cover my experience back in the old days as a beginner and my current experience, covering my own history as well as TYPO3 history.

I hope this will be useful for you, e.g. providing insights in how to become a web developer, how to get started with TYPO3 and how our job and technologies have changed over the years.

I'll dig into the benefits I see in source based distributions in general and especially Nix. This is not about my setup or what I've learned, but what I like right now about my existing setup.

We dig into the nixpkgs repository, the nix language and features we get by using the language to describe the system. We will also see how the NixOS and home-manager modules allowed me to learn Linux way easier.

This should be the first blog post about my Nix Journey, let's see if I’ll continue, there are no promises, except that I hope and plan to continue.

This first post will explain how I got introduced to the hole Nix ecosystem. I try to explain where I started, why I had a look and how it continued. It might help you to see how easy or difficult it might be to switch, But it probably only is explaining my background. Still I try to outline some great benefits that are available right from the beginning. I also hope it will reduce the fear that most often comes when thinking about switching stuff. The post also contains many references to get others started.

I've a small collection of custom shell scripts for various tasks. Many people use different ways of organizing those scripts. I'm using nix home-manager to actually create those scripts. I'll explain the benefits of using home-manager as a wrapper. And I'll explain my naming convention and why I follow the convention.

We need to update software regularly. E.g. because our framework released a new major version containing breaking changes to APIs. It is a cumber stone and hard and boring task, not meant to be done by humans. Luckily we have computers and software we can use to automate boring tasks.

Our example is about TYPO3 and Aimeos updates. TYPO3 is an open source CMS while Aimeos is an open source shop framework. I'll share my experience how to automate the boring tasks during one update and how to use the automation while upgrading further installations.

We will check out rector and show how you can use existing rules with custom configuration to auto mate your code migrations.

I find motivation crucial. It is the most important energy that drives us. Everyone has different motivations, but it is essential to every one of us. I currently lack motivation to write new blog posts. And I decided to write down my thoughts why I lack motivation and what actually motivates me. Maybe that will help some of you to learn from it regarding your own motivation.

My usual workflow for working on forks looks like this: Clone the original repo, add my own fork as second remote. Fetch all changes from original repo, create a new branch, and push this branch to my own fork. The pushing is where the default sucks. Git will by default push to origin which is the original repo without push rights.

I'll explain two solutions I've used so far to ease this little issue with Git.

TYPO3 provides an "Application Information" dropdown to show some information.

This dropdown can be extended with custom information, e.g. some API endpoints or currently deployed Git Commit Hash. This can ease debugging as you can easily check whether the system runs the newest version with all changes applied.

I did that for one of our customers and wanted to share how easy it is to add such information.

I'm a user of the Fediverse. But TYPO3 is not yet there. I've created multiple accounts that mirror feeds to you can follow them within the Fediverse.

The internet (more precisely the www) is a decentralized network where everyone can take part. Everyone should be able to contribute, e.g. by providing content.

I've discovered the www at the end of 90s and became a web developer. The www is one of my passions and I believe in the decentralized human build www. We should not hand over the www to a small group of big corporations.

I'll show you how I contribute to the www. Which software do I use, and what's the benefit.

Sometimes a headline needs to use line breaks or formatting like italic words. Some integrators define placeholders like [BR] which get substituted. We use TYPO3 native RTE functionality with stripped down configuration. This small post describes how we set it up. The goal is to have a small field and features like limited number of characters and reduced formatting possibilities.

I've read different tips & tricks from developers. I've also read different workflows like "git flow". And I've worked with some freelancers and agencies on a dozen of projects.

This post will share my current git workflow that works for all of our clients in all the projects. This includes switching projects and knowing where to continue once you come back. And this also ensures the rest of the team can continue with your work in case you become ill.

I thought it is fine to use older no longer supported PHP versions as long as they are supported by the OS (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, etc.). I've changed my mind after reading blog posts and noticing a change within PHP ecosystem.

Let me explain why I changed my mind and why you should prefer official supported versions instead. This not only is true for PHP but any software.

Functional tests won't mock single implementations. But code often interacts with external systems by sending requests, e.g. via Guzzle. Guzzle is the default library used within TYPO3, so you might need to mock the requests within functional tests.

This blog post explains our solution which is based on Guzzle Docs and Susis Blog post on how to mock Guzzle Client implementation within Unit Tests.

I know many editors and people complaining about TYPO3 for various reasons. In this video I'll show an actual customer project. I demonstrate how performant a website build with TYPO3 and EXT:solr can be. And I demonstrate how pleasant the TYPO3 backend can be.

I'm using Ubuntu LTS for some years now, coming from macOS with Homebrew beforehand.

Right now I'm switching parts of my setup to nix home-manager. Nix itself is a package manager and language to describe how to install packages. home-manager is a community project built on top of the language to describe the setup of a user (home).

This post will give a short overview of the benefits and my new setup. I'm still a beginner in the whole nix ecosystem. Still, I already enjoy it on a daily basis.

TypoScript by concept is meant for frontend context only. There is TSconfig for backend as well. Extbase introduced a way to also configure backend modules via TypoScript. Nowadays TypoScript is also used in other context, e.g. scheduler tasks or commands.

I'll explain how the actual TypoScript is loaded, so you understand that part and can use it.

Some real world examples on how to use the Symfony Dependency Injection in TYPO3. E.g. how to inject TypoScript settings or database query builder.

I hated tag clouds because I didn't understand them. I didn't understand the benefit of those clouds. Today I've understood the huge benefit and actually think they are a must-have. They make using the internet more joyful.

I'll try to explain why I think every website profits from being browsable. I'll show examples where websites lost this feature and are more or less useless to me, and even lose profit. And I'll try to provide ideas how to solve the situation.

Today's search engines are broken. They destroyed the discoverable part of the internet. We are no longer able to find content on the internet. We are pushed towards their own content and big players like Wikipedia or stack overflow. I no longer follow this path and tried to summarize my thoughts and ideas on that topic.

Some of you, like one of our customers, are still on TYPO3 v8 or 9. We all dream of a bright future where we get shiny new features like new event handling by PSR-14, and dependency injection by PSR-11. Still we can write code that actually follows the new features and provides benefits today. Updates will become very smooth thanks to rector which could auto migrate everything necessary.

Read the following sections to get concrete examples on how we write code in 8.7 that will be auto migrated to 10.4 (11.x) via rector and how we profit today.

Some years ago we got a new customer with a lot of similar TYPO3 installations. All had their own Git repository. We decided to migrate this setup to composer and split the existing TYPO3 extensions out of the repositories, into their own. This year we noticed that was a bad idea, and we will migrate all installation into a single Git repository, together with all extensions.

I'll try to explain the initial idea, why we think this was a bad idea, and how we create the new mono repository.

Since TYPO3 10.0 it is possible, actually necessary, to use FQCN (=Fully Qualified Class Names) for controllers when configuring plugins and modules. This provides a new benefit in terms of reusing and sharing code between different extensions.

This blog post will explain the benefit and provide an outlook in a possible future of TYPO3 Extbase extensions.

I'll explain my current setup of Neovim. I'm using this editor since some years as the only editor. I'm a full time developer, mostly working on PHP based websites using the open source CMS TYPO3. Therefore, my Neovim is tuned to ease work in that specific area. I've also worked with ReStructuredText (=rst), Python and TypeScript. Most parts should be reusable for other areas, some are very specific to TYPO3 but might give insights and ideas on how to improve workflows for other projects.

The post will explain my folder directory and setup, as well as plugins and foreign tools that are integrated into Neovim.

A new bugfix version of TYPO3 extension feedit was released.

This one actually allows to use the extension again, and also fixes an issue that prevented proper initialization.

I've created a small tracking extension for TYPO3. This should basically demonstrate what developers can achieve with newest APIs inside of TYPO3 v10.

It also provides widgets and works as a showcase for the new EXT:dashboard.

Two of our customers requested us to extend the extension for their TYPO3 installations. Therefore we added some more features and are now releasing the extension for public use.

This post will provide a small introduction into composer package "maglnet/composer-require-checker".

Some hints regarding usage for TYPO3 extensions is given, while there is not to much to know.

The composer package allows to check missing dependencies within composer.json. Its purpose is to run locally or in a CI to verify that all necessary dependencies are added to the composer.json file.

I prerecorded a talk for the t3oce 2020. The talk should introduce beginners into the concepts of TYPO3. It should explain how to add and edit content, as well as what content in Context of TYPO3 actually is. Once one knows these basic concepts, I explain how to render content with TYPO3.

The talk should work as an basic introduction into TYPO3 for integrators as well as developers.

This is my very first video. It will introduce you to the beginning of PHPUnit to create unit tests for PHP Code.

The video includes instructions on how to install dependencies via composer, as well as how to write and execute first tests.

Execution is done on command line, as this should be the same on all environments.

TYPO3 has hidden gems. One of them is the system extension feedit which adds frontend editing to TYPO3. It adds some options to the admin panel in TYPO3 frontend, and allows integrators to add more fine grained edit experience right into the content.

This post will cover most of the provided features, with screenshots and how to configure the extension. I'll also explain why I prefer the approach of EXT:feedit over extensions like EXT:frontend_editing.

With TYPO3 version 10 around the corner, it is time to have a deeper look at new features. I often hear something like "those features are only targeting developers". Therefore I try to promote opportunities for agencies and users, provided by the new more technical features.

Expect a round up of ext:dashboard, new notification API, PSR-14 Events, and some more.

When using mysqldump, the tool has to be compatible with mysql server version. Some hosters might not provide such an environment. That's one reason when you wanna use mysqldump on your local system to create an mysql dump from a foreign database.

Most environments prevent remote access to the database server, which is a good thing. But this would prevent you from using mysqldump on your local environment. To overcome this issue, you can use ssh to create a temporary tunnel to the database server through another server, e.g. the production system.

E.g. to add a simplified and project-specific News Extension Content element for backend editors.

You might think “I know what plugins, within TYPO3, are”. Maybe that’s true, maybe you will still learn something new.

This blog post will first explain what TYPO3 plugins are. But it will also explain how to define site specific plugins for existing installed 3rd party extensions, and why this might be useful.

TYPO3 provides a comprehensive caching implementation. Built into all parts of TYPO3. By default TYPO3 tries hard to provide a working caching solution for Websites. This way all generated content is cached whenever possible and delivered right from cache without rendering. This leads to some issues if dynamic content is added. Some bypass this issue by deactivating caching partly or for whole pages.

This post explains how to configure TYPO3 to make caching work without deactivating it. One place where caching does not work out of the box is changing files via Filelist module, changes there will not be reflected in content elements using a file reference. This example is used to explain how caching works in TYPO3 and how to adjust caching.

Daniel gave a live coding workshop during the "Hall of Fame Never Code Alone Event". The workshop was in german and recorded on video.

The workshop included the very basics of how to use Vim, and understanding the concepts behind.

The participants worked with a wireless keyboard and tried to find their way around. This is the concept of "Never Code Alone Events".

TYPO3 uses pages to organise the structure of a website. This leads to situations where you have a specific page for a feature, e.g. a page “Search” containing the plugin to display search results. Or a page containing the profile of the currently logged in user. Typically links to these pages are scattered all over the website, e.g. within some content elements, inside the page layout like header and within some plugins.

This Blog post explains how to provide the page uid for a specific page, to all three kinds of “content”, where you typically need this information, with three lines of TypoScript.

This is my personal recap of this years TYPO3 Camp Rhein Ruhr. Especially as this is a German speaking camp. I’ll publish the recap in English, so everyone not capable of understanding the Youtube videos or slides, has a chance to at least know what happened.

Right the day before official start of work shops, @Jens_der_Denker, @spooner_web and myself met. Jens and me set up a basic TYPO3 deployment at bitbucket.org using Bitbucket Pipelines.

From time to time you need to test some email within your TYPO3 installation. Whether it might be that you are a developer sending some mail via a CommandController or Plugin, or you are an integrator configuring EXT:powermail or EXT:form to deliver some mail.

In all cases you need to make sure this mail is not send to external addresses like your customer during development and testing. Also you need to be able to check the content of the mail. In this blog post you will learn what mbox is and how to use it.

As an TYPO3 integrator or developer you will login into the same TYPO3 installations multiple times during the same day. There are different ways to prevent the need to login over and over again. One is to add a bit of PHP to the installation, e.g. inside AdditionalConfiguration.php to prevent any login. This should save a lot of time during development.

In this blog post this solution will be shown and explained. You will never ever have to login on your local installation anymore.

TYPO3 CMS is an open source content management system with lots of contributions. The system has a huge code base which is partially very old and therefore contains a lot of legacy code. Therefore it’s very important to cover existing features with tests, to not break anything if you improve the system.

TYPO3 CMS was improved with a lot of unit and functional tests in the past. Since some time, there are also acceptance tests available, which will test functionality of the backend. All of these tests are executed by the TYPO3 CMS own Bamboo to make sure no merge will break anything. If you want to execute the existing acceptance tests, you already might be a developer and luckily, the repository contains all necessary information to get started.

In this Blog post I will show how to get the necessary information out of the source files and to execute these tests. This should also help in the future, as the way to get there is described, not only how to execute the tests now.

GitLab is the new buzzword for cloud- and self-hosted repository hosting connected to a CI. We are using GitLab-CI in combination with Docker for running tests, linting code and deployments.

In this post I’ll explain how to setup linting TypoScript and YAML for TYPO3 projects using GitLab-CI.

As more and more people like to lint their files, it’s obvious that we also should lint our TypoScript files in TYPO3 projects. Therefore, Martin Helmich has created a TypoScript parser and TypoScript linter.

In this blog post you will learn how to integrate this linter into vim and neovim by using syntastic or ale as a plugin.

During development for TYPO3 you often run into Exceptions. They do not look very nice. A much nicer alternative might be whoops which @dk2kde told me about. It will not only handle exceptions, but also PHP Errors like syntax errors.

In this small blog post I will show you how to use whoops as exception handler for TYPO3 projects during local development.

TYPO3s new form framework allows to write custom form elements. This way you are able to define a new select element, based on the existing one, but filled with options fetched from database.

E.g. you want your user to select from sys_category or some other custom records. In this blog post I will show how to provide the necessary logic in a custom PHP class, how to register a new element extending the existing one and how to use this new element in your forms.

Since TYPO3 CMS Version 8 there is a new Form framework heavily inspired by Neos Form Framework. As most parts of Neos / Flow it’s a great heavy dynamic component with great power.

In this post I will show how easy it is to write a custom finisher to crypt submitted values using the SaltedPasswords extension. This enables you to write fe_user registration forms without the need of 3rd party extensions.

TYPO3 provides a way of dependency injection. This way you do not need to resolve dependencies inside of your code, but the framework will resolve and provide the dependencies for you. This is provided by the framework Extbase, back ported of Flow.

The main benefit is the flexibility. Using Interfaces to define dependencies, instead of concrete classes, it’s possible to exchange injected dependencies just by configuring the framework. This way you can exchange classes in 3rd party code and receive a huge flexibility. Same goes for testing your code. In this Post I will show you the different ways to make use of dependency injection inside of TYPO3 and provide help for edge cases.

This talk will be held at Vimfest 2017 in Berlin. I’ll show how to write plugins for Nvim using the new Python Plugin API. The API is async and wraps the new msgpack. The API is called “Remote Plugin API”.

As an example I will use the plugin neotags, which is my first Nvim plugin using the new API. It’s completely written in Python3 and covered with tests. Of course there are already some tag update plugins out there, but I wanted to try out the new API. Also most of the plugins did not work with my setup, or contain to much code and no tests.

PHP_CodeSniffer is a command line tool allowing to check php, js and css. The main use case is to check code styles like the popular PSR-2. Beside checking coding styles, some communities are already using this tool for further checks like direct access to global variables like $_POST instead of using the provided API, e.g. take a look at Magento PHP_CodeSniffer Coding Standard. Also there is a standard to check compatibility of the code with PHP versions.

Beside this use cases and huge benefits, there is another use case: automated code migrations that can be achieved using PHP_CodeSniffer. In this blog post I will provide the necessary basics and an example how to auto migrate your PHP code using PHP_CodeSniffer.

TYPO3 CMS allows you to build a language menu to enable the frontend user to switch the current language. This menu is generated via TypoScript using optionSplit. Just start a query and take a look at the snippets. This way has one big drawback. In a multi domain setup you have to change the config

We have overcame this issue with one language menu working for all setup on all domains without the need to adjust anything. Read here how to achieve this.

Hooks inside of TYPO3 CMS allow you to hook into existing processes of the core, or of extensions, to manipulate the processes.

This post will explain in more depth what hooks are and how you can find and use them.

Documentation was never easier, with a Framework like Sphinx and a hoster like Read the docs. All you need is a repository containing your Documentation written with Sphinx and an account at Read the docs. Plantuml can be used in addition to generate UML-Diagrams using plain text. The result can be SVG files in the same color as your Documentation. The whole setup and workflow for that will be explained in this Blog post. After reading the post, you are able to kickstart a new documentation and host it at Read the docs. You then can dig deeper and adjust it to your needs.

All instructions are tested on OS X, I’ll not document for Windows. Unix systems should be the same as OS X and you probably already know how to do it yourself.

TYPO3 ships with a debugging process called DevLog. It’s a function provided by the core and used by many extensions. The main purpose is to log information for debugging. Beside the new Core feature Logging Framework, it’s older and therefore used in more extensions. TYPO3 doesn’t ship with a handler for this function, it’s possible to provide handler via TYPO3’s Events, Signals and Hooks mechanism and the popular devlog extension is installed on many TYPO3 installations to have a handler which logs everything to the database and provide a backend module to see the entries. But that’s not necessary, you can register your own, very small handler in your AdditionalConfiguration.php or your distribution.

TYPO3 provides some record types like pages, content, files and categories. With this basic set of record types you can build full blown websites containing products, projects, Blog posts, news and many more different content types without the need of any plugins, it’s just configuration in TYPO3.

To provide a search with filter to the visitor you can use solr as an extension. With these combination there is no need for further custom record types like news or products and plugins or database tables with custom search and filter implementations for all of them.

If you are like me, you have a structured filesystem for your different jobs. E.g. one for your own projects, one for customers, one for learnings, etc. This allows you to set specific options within Vim related to the projects or customers. E.g. if typo3 uses tabs instead of spaces you can configure that for Projects/typo3/**. And if you want to ignore certain folders like build within Sphinx installations, but not within e.g. typo3 projects, you can do it like the following.

Tmux is a nice tool. Most people already know screen, and tmux is like screen a terminal multiplexer.

A terminal multiplexer is a software application that can be used to multiplex several virtual consoles, allowing a user to access multiple separate login sessions inside a single terminal window, or detach and reattach sessions from a terminal.

Sometimes you need settings like TypoScript in a class which is not your controller. Inside a controller, the Extbase framework already injects the settings for you, so you are able to access them under $this->settings.

In all other classes it’s easy to let Extbase inject the settings for you. Just include the following code, and make sure you instantiate the class via \TYPO3\CMS\Extbase\Object\ObjectManager instead of \TYPO3\CMS\Core\Utility\GeneralUtility::makeInstance().

As a dedicated Vim user I’ve collected some links already which I want to share as a list here. This list is dedicated to my team mate @dk2kde. And I recommend walking through them in the order I’ve listed them.