Acqal Experts Blog About TYPO3 and Other Hot Topics

TYPO3 Questionnaire Extension - Powerful and Easy to Use

By: Virgil Huston

The past couple of weeks, I have been consumed with getting the TYPO3 Training Method Effectiveness Survey up and running and now trying to promote it so as to get maximum responses from as wide a range of TYPO3 users at all levels across the world as possible.

By the way, if you haven't taken the survey already, please do, it only takes a few minutes. Click here for the survey.

I used the TYPO3 extension Questionnaire (pbsurvey) to put the survey together and the ease of use and excellent manual allowed me to concentrate on survey design rather than spend a lot of time learning how to use...

TYPO3 Training - What Works?

By: Virgil Huston

TYPO3 Training Method Effectiveness Survey Launched

I have written a number of blog postings here about TYPO3 training and what I perceive as problems associated with overcoming the TYPO3 learning curve, a factor that is often mentioned (perhaps more than any other) as a reason for not using TYPO3 by individuals, agencies and potential clients of TYPO3 agencies. I am not going to repeat these opinions nor am I going to link to the previous blogs because all they are is opinion and educated guessing based on what I have heard and read in the TYPO3 and wider CMS / WMS world. We all know about...

Nominate TYPO3 and FLOW3 for the SourceForge Community Choice Awards

By: Karsten Dambekalns

Hi TYPO3 members! It's time for the annual SourceForge Community Choice awards and we need your help to get TYPO3 and FLOW3 nominated! The more nominations we receive, the better our chances of being a finalist. Click on the links and nominate

  tr.im/nominateTYPO3 for "Best Project" and "Best Project for the Enterprise"   http://tr.im/nominateFLOW3 for "Best New Project" and "Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything"

If we win a nomination, then we can potentially go on to win the category award. Thanks in advance for...

TYPO3 Image Insights

By: Michael Cannon and Marlies Cohen

Photos that come straight off a digital camera are way too big for the Internet both in actual dimensions and in size and have to be resampled. For example, a 1MB image can be reduced to 50K, which will load much faster, especially for people with dial up service and it will take up less room on their computer's hard drive.

Photos generally should be saved in JPG formatIcons and graphics are usually should be saved in GIF or PNG format

Unless you really need high resolution images, try to keep your photos no bigger than 1024x1024 when uploading into TYPO3. However, you may ignore this size...

Prelude to the TYPO3 Training Survey - Definitions

By: Virgil Huston

As I have mentioned before, we will be launching a TYPO3 oriented learning method effectiveness survey. Hopefully, the launch will be this week.There are many methods of learning and elearning reflects a subset of the overall training/learning realm. There is, of course, a lot of overlap. No surprise there.This survey focuses on elearning. As the definitions below indicate, elearning does not have to be online and may even be conducted in a classroom environment. The survey asks for your opinion of the effectiveness for you of various elearning methods specifically for learning any or all...

2 More How-to's on Using TYPO3's tt_news

By: Michael Cannon

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been covering 10 ways of tt_news and 5 How-to's on Using TYPO3's tt_news . Today, I'll cover the two more of 10 alternate ways of using tt_news.

BPMinstitute.org White Papers lead generator

BPMinstitute.org has really pushed what can be done with tt_news in many avenues in regards to lead generation. Whenever downloadable content is available in a login restricted manner, downloading of the media file can trigger a lead notification event directly to the content sponsor. Additionally, the lead information can even be made available for sponsors to...

Use TypoScript for Secure URLs

By: Michael Cannon

It's possible to let TypoScript to help you with enabling secure URLs when the incoming connection is requesting such. To do so, put the following code in your TypoScript template in Constants or Setup depending upon how you set config.baseURL or config.absRefPrefix in Setup.

config.baseURL = www.acqal.com/config.absRefPrefix = www.acqal.com [globalString = _SERVER|HTTPS=on] config.baseURL = https://www.acqal.com/ config.absRefPrefix = https://www.acqal.com/ [end]

From our professional experience, we've found that a full URL for absRefPrefix is the long term...

5 How-to's on Using TYPO3's tt_news

By: Michael Cannon

Today and next week, we'll cover the how to do of last week's 10 ways of tt_news.

SavvyMiss.com Topical news Articles

SavvyMiss.com, a community for women, has lots of very topical content and for each topic, it's best served within its own section. Additionally, as each topic has its own section, there's also branded landing pages for each topic which allows for very targeted advertising.

How-to Topical news Articles

The basic premise is to create not one, but multiple tt_news content elements each with only a specific category allowed. 

To prevent having to set the order by...

Training Method Effectiveness for Learning TYPO3

By: Virgil Huston

As I have mentioned before, I believe that the biggest barrier to the adoption of TYPO3 is the perception that it is too difficult to learn. Many of the frustrations one sees expressed are from people who have given up because of the steep learning curve.There are a number of facets to this argument. First, I don't think anyone would disagree that there is a learning curve associated with TYPO3 for all levels of users, from the content writer to editor to publisher to administrator to developer.Any product with the enterprise level capabilities of TYPO3 requires extensive learning. This is...

Include content elements in a template via TypoScript

By: Michael Cannon

If you want to include specific TYPO3 content elements in a specific spot of your template via TemplaVoila or Modern Template Building, here's an easy way to create the TypoScript for doing so.

# use content element for search blocklib.static.search = RECORDSlib.static.search.tables = tt_contentlib.static.search.source = 164

The tables property is the name of the TYPO3 database table being selected from.

The source property is the unique ID, often called uid, of the specific records to select. It's possible to select multiple items through a comma separated list like...