Acqal has added a team of six TYPO3 gurus that will be assisting us with support items as well as projects. We’ve also added a Senior Technical Advisor, Ries van Twisk. Ries will be working with us on those projects that require more advanced technical and strategic knowledge. We’ve been working very hard to get everyone trained and are constantly implementing new processes in an effort to increase our efficiency. We welcome any and all feedback to ensure that we are strengthening Acqal.

With these changes we believe that Acqal deserves a fresh, new face. We will begin a brand overhaul in the upcoming weeks and plan to unveil the new brand shortly before T3CON10 in Dallas – May 20-22.

One more item, please note that we have changed our phone numbers.

• Sales: +1 (612) 284-2803
• Support: +1 (803) 426-3355

Our old numbers will still work for a few days. We will be updating our site and literature with the new numbers over the next day.

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© 2009 Acqal Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Please subscribe to Acqal Newsletter and Acqal Blogging via Email or RSS Feed .

© 2009 Acqal Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Acqal continues to promote helping others and having a little fun with a recent charity contribution to World Vision for 10 bicycle loans. This donation enables families to be loaned the funds to purchase a bicycle and every 6-months another family will be able to do the same.

The simple addition of a bicycle to impoverished farm families allows them to move more goods safely and quickly between home and market. This positively influences their health and helps them make their labors more efficient.

From World Vision:

Give a bike loan and help 10 families out of poverty. Your gift of a bicycle loan will actually provide 10 bicycles over the next five years — to enable 10 families to carry more goods to the market and increase their income. It all starts with a loan to help one mom or dad buy a bike. When that loan is repaid, within six months the money is loaned to the next recipient — and so on. With one gift, you can help transform the lives of 10 families.

Help out as well by donating to World Vision.

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© 2009 Acqal Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Please subscribe to Acqal Newsletter and Acqal Blogging via Email or RSS Feed .

© 2009 Acqal Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

You can change Name, Email, and Subject of above to display as you'd like on the front-end. Don't change name, email, and subject or else the sent email from name, from email, and subject will not be what the submitter provided.

The * before name and email denotes those fields as required.

The EMAIL of email, informs TYPO3 to validate the input as an email address prior to clicking submit.

Reference

• FORM

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© 2009 Acqal Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

1. Website Language Creation
   1. On the TYPO3 Global page via List mode, add a new Website Language. Take note of the uid of that language. To do so, hover over the Website Language icon after saving and closing to see the uid. You'll need this for the sys_language_uid setting later on.
2. TypoScript Localization by URL or L Parameter
   1. If you do not have the cbstarter extension installed, put Section A into your main website TypoScript template Setup area. Otherwise, put Section A into your main website TypoScript template Constants area.
   2. Put Section B into your main website TypoScript template Setup area, below Section A.
   3. Based upon the URLs or domain names specific to your website and website languages, edit the Section A and Section B config.baseURL and sys_language_uid entries.
   4. config.locale_all
      1. Configures the locale which influences how some values from PHP is formated in the output, eg. dates formatted using strftime() which will then output month/day names in that language.
      2. Refer to the ICU User guide to format the locale_all entry.
      3. Refer to the ISO 639-2 Code List for the language code.
      4. Refer to ISO 3166 for the country code.
   5. config.language
      1. Configures the system “language key” to be used for the language. This is used to select labels from llXML (locallang-XML) files. Setting this should make frontend plugins respond by showing labels from the correct language (requires installation of the corresponding language packs).
   6. config.htmlTag_langKey
      1. Changes "xml:lang" and "lang" attributes in the <html> element.
3. UTF-8 Configuration
   1. If you do not have extension cbstarter installed, put Section C into your main website TypoScript template Setup area. Otherwise, put Section C into your main website TypoScript template Constants area.
   2. Put Section D into your typo3conf/localconf.php file.
4. RealURL Configuration
   1. Edit your realurl configuration to include a preVars > getVars > L entry.
   2. See Section E for a sample.
5. Click "Clear all caches" for your TYPO3 installation.
6. Create localized content
   1. Basic process
      1. Create alternative page language record
      2. Via Web > Page (TemplaVoila), click the "Create localized version" link on each content element you desire localization of.
      3. Via Web > Page, click the create new content icon, and set the language drop-down.
         
   2. Refer to the references for creating content in detail.

Section A - TypoScript Localization by URL

config.baseURL = www.cannonbose.com

# SSL is for cannonbose.com
[globalString = _SERVER|HTTPS=on]
	config.baseURL = https://www.cannonbose.com/
[end]

Section B - TypoScript Localization by URL or L Parameter

config {
	linkVars = L
	uniqueLinkVars = L
	sys_language_mode = content_fallback
	sys_language_overlay = 1
	sys_language_softMergeIfNotBlank = tt_content:image, tt_content:header

	sys_language_uid = 0
	locale_all = en_US
	language = en
	htmlTag_langKey = en-us
}

# French
[globalVar = GP:L = 1] 
	config.sys_language_uid = 1
	config.locale_all = fr_FR
	config.language = fr
	config.htmlTag_langKey = fr

# Chinese (Simplified)
[globalVar = GP:L = 2] || [globalString = _SERVER|HTTP_HOST= *.cn]
	config.sys_language_uid = 2
	config.locale_all = zh_CN
	config.language = cn
	config.htmlTag_langKey = zh-cn
	config.baseURL = www.cannonbose.cn

# Chinese (Traditional)
[globalVar = GP:L = 3] || [globalString = _SERVER|HTTP_HOST= *.tw]
	config.sys_language_uid = 3
	config.locale_all = zh_TW
	config.language = tw
	config.htmlTag_langKey = zh-tw
	config.baseURL = www.cannonbose.com.tw
[end]

Section C - TypoScript UTF-8 Configuration

config.renderCharset = utf-8
config.metaCharset = utf-8

Section D - localconf.php UTF-8 Configuration

$TYPO3_CONF_VARS['BE']['forceCharset'] = 'utf-8';

Section E - realurl.php Sample Configuration

$TYPO3_CONF_VARS['EXTCONF']['realurl']['_DEFAULT']['preVars'] = array(
		array(   
			'GETvar' => 'L', 
			'valueMap' => array(
				// 'english'
				'en' => '0',
				// 'french'
				'fr' => '1',
				// chinese simplified
				'cn' => '2',
				// 'chinese traditional
				'tw' => '3',
			),   
			'noMatch' => 'bypass',
		),
	);

References

• TYPO3 Frontend Localization Guide
• Multi Language Sites in TYPO3
• TYPO3 XHTML
• cbrealurl realurl.php

Extensions

• cbstarter
• cbrealurl

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© 2009 Acqal Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Predictions for 2010

1. The US TYPO3 community will grow and become more cohesive as we all embrace the TYPO3 tag-line, "Inspiring People to Share." T3CON10-Dallas will far exceed expectations. I am honored to have been selected to be part of the Organising Team and there are some great folks on this team, including Ron Hall, Mark Infield, Zach Davis, Juergen Egeling and Kian Gould, among others whose names I cannot recall offhand. The web site and early bird registration will be launched within a few days, but mark your calendars for May 20-22.

2. The TYPO3 Association will grow and continue its good work. We are getting ready to pay our dues for the next year and we encourage everyone to join. The Association, as a centralized control point for TYPO3 development and management, is one of the reasons that TYPO3 is among the best managed and stable open source software products. The Association combines the advantages of the usual open source community with the control of a proprietary software company. It can't get any better than this!

If you haven't joined yet, being a member of the TYPO3 Association is essential for anyone / any company using TYPO3. There are very reasonable fees for individuals and a variety of options for agencies. If you do nothing else to support the best CMS in the world, at least join the Association.

Click here for their Steering Committee Strategical Meeting report held December 4th.

3. TYPO3 development will continue to progress in a very positive way, with both TYPO3 4.4 and TYPO3 5. It gets better and better and this will contribute to further acceptance of TYPO3 as the enterprise CMS of choice for serious, mission critical web sites and intranets.

4. As for Acqal, we will continue our growth, continuing our migration, support and training services. But what is really exciting will be the launching of two new initiatives in 1st QTR 2010. One is high availability web hosting with failover, 24/7 monitoring, sophisticated backup system, specifically designed with TYPO3 in mind, but also suitable for other types of mission critical web sites. And we have been able to put this together at very reasonable rates. This hosting is not your average hosting company that claims to do everything, but doesn't.
 
The other new offering will be a TYPO3 based SAAS content management system with various options available. More on that in the coming weeks.

Best wishes from we at Acqal to the entire TYPO3 community for a productive and healthy new year.

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© 2009 Acqal Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

From Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 02:00 email `[t3a-members] Quarterly Report`

--------------------------------------------------
TYPO3 Association Quarterly Report
--------------------------------------------------

Dear Supporters of the TYPO3 Association,

Further down I send you the link for downloading the Quarterly Report of the TYPO3 Association.

The most important event in the last quarter has been the very successful T3CON09. The financial success of the conference exceeded all expectations and therefore resolved a budget shortage. Additionally these additional funds allowed us to support a completely new event in November: The T3UXW09 (TYPO3 Usability eXperience Week). During this week 30 specialists of the TYPO3 community worked on TYPO3 usability issues of the Version 4 branch.

The report is available at the Association's website:
http://association.typo3.org/fileadmin/downloads/3rd_Quarterly_Report_T3A_2009.pdf

If you have suggestions or want to give us some feedback regarding the Quarterly Report, don't hesitate to write an email to info[at]typo3[dot]org.

Thank you for your support and looking forward to a great 2010!

With best regards on behalf of the board,

Søren Schaffstein
Press Officer and 1st Assessor of the TYPO3 Association
http://association.typo3.org

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Despite our abysmal first attempt with installing the Redmine project management software back in September, we've been loving Redmine for helping keep our projects on track. As we get closer to a mid-February launch of high-availability, failover TYPO3 hosting, we wanted to migrate our non-TYPO3 websites and special server configurations to new environments.

As Redmine is a Ruby-based project management system, this meant spinning up a new CentOS 5 server with cPanel/WHM and Ruby. This time around though, our week-long headache only lasted 4 hours. Out of it, comes the following walk-through to get Ruby up and running on cPanel/WHM easily for you.

Walk-Through: cPanel/WHM and Ruby

• Review Ruby on Rails and cPanel/WHM and Passenger install
• Log into the server via SSH
• As root or via sudo run the following commands

unset RUBYOPT
/scripts/installruby
/usr/local/cpanel/bin/ror_setup
passenger-install-apache2-module

• The passenger-install-apache2-module command is interactive. Accept its notices by pressing the Enter button. At the end of the passenger-install-apache2-module, you'll need to update Apache configuration files.
• Create /usr/local/apache/conf/ruby.conf and add to it the lines given from passenger-install-apache2-module like the following

LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.5/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.5
PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby

• Next, edit /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf and add

Include "/usr/local/apache/conf/ruby.conf"

below

Include "/usr/local/apache/conf/php.conf"

• While still editing httpd.conf, we need to let our project management domain VirtualHost use custom Apache directives. To do so, remove the "#" before the Include like below.

<VirtualHost XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:80>
    ServerName SUB.DOMAIN.com
    …
    Include "/usr/local/apache/conf/userdata/std/2/USERNAME/SUB.DOMAIN.com/*.conf"
    …
</VirtualHost>

• As changes to httpd.conf need to preserved for future updates, it's vitally important to run the apache_conf_distiller. More on Custom Directives to httpd.conf.

/usr/local/cpanel/bin/apache_conf_distiller --update --main

• Since it's easier to install Redmine as a whole into /home/USERNAME/public_html, we'll use a custom Apache directive to change the DocumentRoot in a file called /usr/local/apache/conf/userdata/std/2/USERNAME/SUB.DOMAIN.com/vhost.conf to point to the Ruby on Rails public directory.

DocumentRoot /home/USERNAME/public_html/public 

• Once the project domain's custom Apache directives are saved, they also need to checked and preserved. To update the include files for your user, run

/scripts/ensure_vhost_includes --user=USERNAME

• To confirm that your domain's custom directives are included, you can run the following.

/scripts/verify_vhost_includes

• If you didn't need custom Apache directives, you'll need to restart Apache.

/scripts/restartsrv_httpd

At this point, your ready to go with running the Redmine installation on your cPanel/WHM server. The Links section offers further references and please feel free to comment or ask questions via comments below.

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© 2009 Acqal Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

However, what one gets when running a Log report can be quite confusing for someone not familiar with the terminology one sees. In addition, the Log really doesn't tell you specifically what was changed, particularly with content, which is what the client was interested in. User names may or may not be understood, etc. Bottom line is that the normal TYPO3 Log report is not detailed enough and readable for many audiences.

Use of the Acqal log_analyzer and difference_viewer greatly improve how one can look at and examine logs. These two extensions were written by Acqal's resident development genius and CEO, Michael Cannon, and are available in The Extension Repository.

In addition to being a more readable and detailed report, the log_analyzer can enhance security, as it makes identifying changes, when they occurred, and what user made them quick and easy, in addition to specific changes made with use of the difference_viewer. In fact, installation of log_analyzer is recommended in the TYPO3 Security Checklist: Die wichtigsten Massnahmen für TYPO3-Administratoren, um eine TYPO3-Installation sicherer zu machen, Version 0.9.2 vom 7. Oktober 2009, by Martin Sauter (in German). Note that this is an excellent document and, even if you don't read German, is worth a look.

Let's take a look at some screen shots to illustrate my points:

View of typical Log Report:

Next, a view of the filtering options available in the log_analyzer report:

Next, a view of a typical log_analyzer report. Clicking on a "see difference" link will take you to the difference viewer page (note you must have the difference_viewer installed to get this feature, these are two separate extensions):

A view of a diff report:

Setting up these two extensions is easy. Install both using the Extension Manager as with any other extension. Then, create a page for viewing the diff reports and add the plug in content element.

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