Live Update

The Live Update from version 2.9.5 to 2.10.0 includes almost 1,500 files, if you upgrade from a prior version, it might be even more. This makes this update the biggest in the history of Contao which requires cor­res­pon­ding script timeout and memory limit settings. Therefore, check your server limits and php.ini settings before you start the Live Update.

In case the Live Update terminates prematurely, open the Contao installation directory (e.g. with your FTP client), find the system/constants.php file and reset VERSION and BUILD to the prior installed version (e.g. version 2.9 and build 5 for Contao 2.9.5). Then restart the Live Update.

Third-party extensions

Not all extensions in the Extension Repository are already available for version 2.10. Therefore, check your installed extensions before the update and update them accordingly or temporarily deactivate them in the back end settings.

If you need to use an extension which has not yet been approved for version 2.10, try to deactivate the request tokens in the back end settings. Most extensions should then run under Contao 2.10. Note, however, that this change decreases the security of your installation!

Website: http://www.contao.org

Changes include:

• Updated TinyMCE to version 3.3.8
• Improved the theme exporter to skip back end templates
• Improved the theme importer to check for existing custom templates
• Added: added a Safari patch for the EditArea plugin
• Added: added a Swedish translation to the TinyMCE typolinks plugin
• Added: added a warning to the login screen if cookies are not allowed
• Fixed: the listing module always showed the primary key column
• Fixed: empty article teaser drop-down menu when only a root page was mounted
• Fixed: the hyperlink element did not handle mailto-links correctly
• Fixed: the table sort script did not handle tag replacements correctly
• Fixed: the version 2.9 database update failed when upgrading from version 2.6
• Fixed: the maximum front end image width was not calculated correctly
• Fixed: custom image gallery templates threw an exception the back end
• Fixed: fixed an XSS vulnerability in the front end
• Fixed: the feed generator did not always use the correct publication date
• Fixed: fixed two style sheet importer issues
• Fixed: the front end preview links did not work with URL rewriting enabled
• Fixed: not all browser languages were checked when looking for a website root
• Fixed: the front end cache only worked with rewritten URLs
• Fixed: recursive duplication of a page created an empty record
• Fixed: the comments form was not displayed if an element was protected
• Fixed: change the link title when nodes are expanded or collapsed
• Fixed: do not add pages with robots=”noindex” to the XML sitemap
• Fixed some minor issues

More info: news, interview, review

Website: http://www.contao.org

TYPOlight version 2.8.2 is available. The maintenance release updates TinyMCE, TCPDF and MooTools More to their latest versions and includes a couple of new callbacks and hooks. It also fixes a potential request forgery vulnerability in the back end, therefore it is recommended to update.

Updated plugins

The following plugins have been updated:

• TinyMCE to version 3.3.2
• TCPDF to version 4.9.011
• MooTools More to version 1.2.4.4

New interfaces

The following DCA callbacks and hooks have been added:

• oncut_callback: Calls a custom function when a record is moved.
• oncopy_callback: Calls a custom function when a record is duplicated.
• addComment hook: Is executed when a comment is added.
• loadDataContainer hook: Is executed when a Data Container Array is loaded.

Important bug fixes

The following issues have been fixed (for a complete list, please refer to the ticket system):

• The PDF export function partially generated wrong links.
• The custom navigation module was not displayed in certain situations.
• The Config class incorrectly treated certain text values as numbers.
• The news and event modules did not override the page meta description.
• Regular users could not move multiple content elements at once.
• The newsletter module did not embed all images in the newsletter.

Find out what has been done

Get an overview of all changes in the ticket system or the changelog.

Download the release at sourceforge.net.

If you’ve never heard of this project, you can learn more by reading our Typolight review or checking out our related Typolight articles.

CC: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

LF: My name is Leo Feyer, I am a 32 year old software developer from Munich, Germany. I am the owner of a small company called iNet Robots, which offers web hosting, software development and meanwhile also TYPOlight services.

I learned object-oriented Java programming during my studies and was impressed by its possibilities. PHP 4, which was the current PHP version at that time, did not have much support for object-oriented programming, so coming from Java it was clear to me that TYPOlight needed to be written in PHP 5. It still does not offer the same functionality as Java does, but it will catch up with the upcoming milestone releases of PHP 5.3 and PHP 6.

CC: According to your website, in 2004 you became dissatisfied with the open source offerings of the time and created TYPOlight. What specifically did you find dissatisfying?

Leo Feyer

LF: First of all, there were far fewer CMS than there are today and none of them were able to generate accessible and standards compliant websites. The big systems of course had plugins, but I felt like web standards and accessibility should be a basic core feature and not just an add-on.

Second of all, the professional systems had (and still have) a very steep learning curve – not only for developers but also for designers. It took me weeks to fully understand them and I instantly knew that none of my clients or designers were able/willing to spend that much time learning a complex CMS just to create a website.

So I decided to create a “no frills” system that has all the powerful features but implements them the simplest possible way to maximize the usability and understandability.

CC: What was your primary goal when creating TYPOlight?

LF: I wanted to create a powerful yet intuitive and easy to learn CMS which generates accessible and standards compliant websites. It should not have too many abstraction layers or custom scripting languages which make it hard to learn for professional users and impossible to understand for non-professionals.

CC: In our recent review of the product, we mentioned that a large portion of the user base is non-english speaking, where is the largest portion of your user base located?

LF : Definitely in the German-speaking countries (Germany, Switzerland and Austria). TYPOlight has been mentioned in various german magazines and by the end of 2010, there will be four german TYPOlight books and two german TYPOlight training videos. That is why a lot more people are aware of TYPOlight there than outside of Germany.

CC: Do you have any regrets with the system? Is there anything you wish you had done better or could change?

LF: It turned out that the distinction between users and members (back and front end users) has many advantages but is not an ideal solution in scenarios where the same users shall have access to both the back end and the front end. Also, quite a few users have trouble understanding why pages and articles are two separate modules instead of one tree. Both are likely to be changed in the next major release (TYPOlight 3).

CC: In 2007, TYPOlight came 2nd place in the Most Promising Open Source CMS Awards from Packt Publishing. How far have you come since then?

LF: We made it to the final five in the “Best Open Source PHP CMS” category together with Drupal, WordPress, Joomla! and MODx. And although we did not win the 2009 awards, it is an honor for a young project like TYPOlight to be mentioned along with those well-established systems.

CC: What  is your favorite TYPOlight driven website?

LF: That is hard to say, because I only know a few of the many websites which run on TYPOlight. Some (in the German-speaking countries) well-known companies and famous athletes have recently relaunched their websites with TYPOlight, which makes me very proud. Besides that, typolight.org is certainly one of my favorite websites, because it is a good example of what the system is capable of.

CC: What is the largest site that uses TYPOlight?

LF: I know about a project that combines 35 websites with about 250,000 pages into a single TYPOlight installation on a dedicated server cloud. In the end, it is mostly a question of hardware and since TYPOlight requires less resources than many of its contenders, it can actually help to decrease your costs.

CC: In one years time, what would you like to accomplish with TYPOlight?

LF: We want to try to increase the awareness of TYPOlight – especially outside Germany – and to expand the international community. Considering the application itself, our focus in 2010 will be on creating websites for mobile devices with TYPOlight (Mobile Web) and integrating services like Twitter and Facebook into TYPOlight (Social Web).

CC: Can you provide a sneak peak into upcoming features or changes?

LF: We want people to be able to create websites for mobile devices with TYPOlight in addition to their regular browser-targeted website. This could be done using a special style sheet, different content elements or even a separate site structure. We are also looking for a way to create news items and events using a mobile phone, which could be accomplished by adding a separate interface for mobile devices or creating an XML-RPC interface that can be used by e.g. a native iPhone app.

Finally, we want to add a news/events distributor to the back end which automatically publishes news articles and events on Twitter, Facebook and Co.

CC: If people were interested in contributing to the system, what is the best way to do so?

LF: The best way to contribute to the application itself is to create a TYPOlight extension. TYPOlight provides a powerful API with a lot of dynamic configuration, callbacks and hooks which allows you to customize almost any aspect of the program-flow. In case you need a new hook, you can request it in the ticket system at dev.typolight.org.

The best way to contribute to the TYPOlight project is to join the community and let us know what you can do. We are constantly looking for translators to help us to translate the TYPOlight core and over 300 extensions into different languages. We are also looking for authors and journalists to publish articles about TYPOlight in blogs and magazines. And if you happen to be a developer, there is even more that you can do, e.g. to write a tool to import the content from other CMS into TYPOlight or to implement one of the many ideas submitted in the ticket system at dev.typolight.org.

CC: Thank you for your time Leo and best of luck with your project. For our readers, you can learn more about this great system by visiting the Typolight project website at http://www.typolight.org

LF: Thanks a lot for your support and keep up the good work :)

A full change log that itemizes what has been done since release candidate 1 can be found here: TYPOlight changelogs.

One of the key changes is an Improved Events list:

Similar to the improved news lists, the event list interval can now be set dynamically by changing the parameter name in the URL. The module responds to “year”, which displays all events of the specified year, to “month”, which displays all events of the specified month and to “day”, which displays all events of a particular day. In addition, you can configure the news list to only show past or upcoming events, which replaces the upcoming events module (removed in version 2.8.RC2).

You can learn more about TYPOlight or download the release from their website.

In an email sent to the Typolight community, the Typolight team has made it quite clear the impact of this security hole and why they want people to patch immediately.

We would like to applaud the Typolight developers for their honesty and the time they have taken to explain to people why they need to patch right away. It’s clear the Typolight team does not mess around when it comes to security and that’s should make those using their CMS feel like they have made the right choice.

More about this security hole and how to fix it can be found here: http://www.typolight.org/news/items/major-security-hole-in-the-typolight-install-tool.html

The first step to setting up Typolight is to download and install the software package.

You can then unzip and upload to your web host. Once you’ve done this, simply visit http://yourdomain.com/typolight/install.php to kick off the installer.

Initially, you will be prompted to enter an install password… by default, this is “typolight”. This is the first time we’ve seen an install tool password so far, but it’s not a bad idea.

Once you enter the default one, you will be asked to select a new password.

Once you’ve selected a new password, you can proceed through the installation.

Now it’s time to enter an encryption key. Personally, this seems like a bit of overkill and it’s not very clear when/how this would be used but i’m sure it’s in the documentation somewhere. Having a focus on security is nice, but it would be better if the tool itself made it a bit more clear as to when these features would be used or at the very least, link to an article on the Typolight site that describes it’s purpose (for those that are interested).

It’s now time to enter the database information and begin populating the tables.

Once the database population process is complete, you have an option to start with a blank template (which is what you will end up with if you select nothing in the step below.. or you can select the example website in the drop down and have a starting point to work with. This is entirely up to personal preference but nice to have the option.

It is then time to create an administrator user. If you enter nothing here and have selected the example website in the previous step, it will create an admin with the info shown below. If you’d prefer to make your own account (which we suspect you would) then simply fill in your details.

Once completed, you can proceed to the back end and log in with your previously specified credentials.

This is where Typolight really shines. The back end of the system is very well organized and it’s quite easy to access the various menus. Be forewarned, however.. this CMS is definitely not for new users with no experience using content management systems (well, unless you are prepared to do quite a bit of reading first).

Pro’s

• Typolight is very powerful and within the backend, one can make very elaborate and detailed page structures, content layouts and modules that can be positioned within the system.
• The system is clean, lean and well organized and finding settings is very straight forward (for the most part)
• The installation process is simple and easy to understand.
• The extension manager allows you to browse and install extensions without leaving the back end which is a nice feature.

Con’s

• A large portion of the user base are in Europe and as such, there is a lot of non-english discussions (the english side of the forums is fairly active but not as active as the european) and as such, getting support is not as easy as it could be and it can be sometimes difficult to understand those who reply.
• While powerful, the module/page layout process can get very confusing and overwhelming quickly.. even though we’ve used this system previously, we still find we get hung up and performing tasks that otherwise should be fairly simple.
• Themes are not free and if you want one, you have to maintain the links of the designer or pay extra to remove them. (All of the themes are provided by the creators other business, iNetRobots). We found the pricing to be a bit high.

Overall, Typolight is a good system if you are a designer or have a designer who can work with you to develop a solid site. You also need to ensure you are comfortable taking the time to learn the system thoroughly before delving in.

To counter the learning curve, there are a number of books and videos available as well on the Typolight site that can help new users become more familiar with the system. They can be found here: http://www.typolight.org/books-and-videos.html

Agree? Disagree? Comments are open.

Upgrading is recommended. A full change log can be found in the usual places.

Source: Typolight Website

The changelog shows the full list of changes but here is a quick summary:

Build 3 (2009-09-06)

• Added dynamic spellchecker languages to TinyMCE
• Added pseudo entities [‎{‎] and [‎}‎] to output insert tags
• Fixed issue with breadcrumb menu not handling redirect pages
• Fixed issue with incorrect row count in forms with hidden fields
• Fixed issue with empty rows in memberlists without username (#929)
• Fixed issue with event feeds containing foreign entries (#866)
• Fixed issue with certain multi-day events not being calculated correctly (#855)
• Fixed issue with empty keywords being added to the meta keywords tag (#540)
• Fixed issue with navigation icons not being disabled in the template editor (#761)
• Fixed issue with insert tag “user” not formatting its output (#957)
• Fixed issue with backlinks not being exempt from the search index (#896)
• Fixed issue with special characters in file names not being decoded properly (#877)
• Fixed issue with default user and group not being applied (#888)
• Fixed issue with missing “readonly” attribute of text field widgets (#901)
• Fixed issue with group login page overriding option “last page visited” (#916)
• Fixed issue with nails of large images exceeding the memory limit (#922)
• Fixed issue with subscriptions being activated upon registration (#881)
• Fixed a few issues with the style sheet importer (#838)
• Fixed various spelling issues (#942)
• Fixed a few minor issues

More info and downloads of course on the Typolight website.