Acqal Experts Blog About TYPO3 and Other Hot Topics

Cheers to Jweiland for TYPO3 Best Practice Workshop

By: Michael Cannon

Jochen Weiland and Riona Kuthe of JWeiland.net in Germany gave a very good presentation on some TYPO3 best practices last year in Berlin at the TYPO3 conference.

I found the related presentation workshop PDF again today and looked a bit deeper into than before. There's lots of good advice contained therein regarding hosting recommendations, modularizing TypoScript code and helping pick which templating method is right for you.

I strongly recommend reading the PDF, it's in English, which is available below.

Upload Images with TYPO3 Filelist Module

By: Marlies Cohen

Here's a quick set of directions for uploading multiple images, media and other files to your TYPO3 system via the Filelist module.

Select 'Filelist' in the TYPO3 (left) column Expand the images folder for the section the image(s) are destined for Select the grey icon for the folder where the image(s) have to go. From the popup menu select 'Upload Files' or click on the Upload folder icon If more than one image needs to be uploaded select the down arrow next to 1 file box and choose the number. If you are replacing an existing file select 'overwrite...

Getting Overwhelmed? Duck Out for a Bit!

By: Michael Cannon

The past two weeks got too heavy for me, so I took a much needed break. More of a personal read than business.

Corporate Responsibility in Poor Economic Times

By: Virgil Huston

I was going to be more specific with today's blog, but my sister-in-law had emergency surgery today and came out of the operating room a couple of hours ago after 8 hours of surgery (she is in ICU but doing OK). So, I had to postpone my delivery of Acqal's quarterly check to a deserving nonprofit organization. That will happen next week and I will let you know who and why we selected this particular organization.We started Acqal in October, 2008, in the midst of a recession. We didn't know how bad the economic climate would be when we decided to form the company, but we went ahead. All of us,...

Just Updated TYPO3 and Can't Login, Try These Tips!

By: Michael Cannon

For those of you who just upgraded to TYPO3 4.2.6, but can't log into the backend anymore, try the following steps to get going again.

In your web browserFlush cacheClear cookiesLog into TYPO3Click LogoutLog into TYPO3Clear configuration cache Login should be back to normalIf not, TRUNCATE the TYPO3 database tablesbe_sessionsfe_sessionsOnly if front end users are having the same troubleDefinitely should be all clear now

The login problem stems from not logging out of the TYPO3 backend prior to the upgrade and the new encryption algorithm being in place now.

Busting 4 Myths About Open Source

By: Virgil Huston

The second thing that angered me last week was on the topic of open source myths. It began when I received my copy of the May, 2009, issue of Website Magazine. This is the ONLY free industry publication that I actually read and I thought it was a pretty good until this week. What did it for me, was an article by Paul Markun, "Choosing the Best Web Content Management System." The editors certainly did not do their due diligence when they published this and did a serious disservice to their readers.The author is VP of Marketing for Sitecore, a proprietary web content management system...

Cache clearing for news and calender items

By: Marlies Cohen

News and Calendar elements work differently than regular page elements, in that there is a little explanation of the system for them to show up on the front end.

The news/calendar items are generally created and stored in the storage folder for the section. Selecting 'Save document and view page' does not work for news/calendar items as they are not stored on the page on which they are displayed, but in a storage folder. To have the item displayed in the browser, you have to switch to the section page itself. The Internet browser automatically caches (memorizes) the...

Not Good, Not Bad, Just Different

By: Michael Cannon

You've got to stop banging your head on the wall at some point.

TYPO3 and Other Open Source WCM Systems Dissed Again

By: Virgil Huston

I have written about this before in a four part series ending with "Spending money is better than saving it on ECM and CMS." I have also done a pretty objective comparison between TYPO3 and its primary open source competitor, Drupal, in "TYPO3 is the Best Enterprise Content Management System (CMS)."I have an empirical science background, so I am well aware that we all have biases. However, unless one is intentionally trying to deceive or is just plain not that bright, when writing comparison or advice articles or consulting with clients, one has to be completely honest and...

Automatic tt_news META descriptions via Acqal's extension aqnewsmeta

By: Michael Cannon

Acqal is pleased to announce the version 1.0.0 release of aqnewsmeta. This extension updates the TYPO3 newsSubheader register with a truncated, HTML-free version of the news bodytext if no article teaser is available.This is helpful for SEO purposes where each news entry should have a META description, but doesn't.

The extension includes options to adjust the META description length, currently set at 150 characters, per SEO best practices.

References

aqnewsmeta on TER