Nov 27, 2011

Frustrated by the tt_news upgrade

Today I wanted to write a blog post about productivity. Coming to the BE I noticed that I still had TYPO3 4.4.9 running. So I went to upgrade. It usually takes 10-20 minutes to upgrade a TYPO3 version for me. Well, it took nearly 2.5 hours and I had to revert from tt_news 3.1.0 to old good tt_news 2.5.0 because 3.1.0 simply does not work properly. Here is what does not work:
  • When the plugin is inserted as a content element, it does not appear on the page. The reason is that it does not add itself to TypoScript anymore (to tt_content.list.20). I had to investigate and add it manually.
  • New page browser in tt_news does not replace certain markers out of the box. Why couldn't the developer simply use a pagebrowse extension instead of doing a complex thing himself?
  • The formatting is changed too much.
You can tell me that TYPO3 4.4.9 and tt_news 2.5.0 is too old. Yes, that's true. You are absolutely right. But there is one important thing to know. I had no problems updating TYPO3 core or any other extension. However I had huge problems with tt_news. As usual.
People, when you write your code, remember a gold rule: the less problems people have with your creation, the more they will like it. Upgrade should be smooth. Behavior should be compatible!
I hate tt_news. (Georg, yes, I know about news2 but I am not ready to migrate to it. I am out of time.)
No productivity blog post for today because my productivity for today is out of order, thanks to tt_news.
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8 comments:

  1. Hi Dmitry,



    1st of all, extension key is news, news2 was just a development name and this key never got to TER ;)



    2nd) I don't like those kind of rants at all when it is about open source projects. You are using tt_news for free (yeah I know that you know all of those arguments) and pagebrowser was done this way for ages before your extension reached the TER. So of course you can just create a patch for it? I did the same for my extension, did a cutom pagination and backported the features back to fluid's core.



    what i wanted to say: how much time and producivity did you save while using tt_news and no need to do it on your own? major updates in 20min is not really much, even for a core dev. you should expect some troubles ;)

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  2. Well, if people do not rant, they have to pretend that everything is perfect, even when they have problems. I rant because tt_news *is* a problem for me. I think it is fully ok to rant about an pen source project *if* you participate in it and contribute. Anybody, who contributes, has rights to rant and say that crap is crap :)



    Regarding tt_news and productivity. I do not use tt_news anymore except here. Here I use it here only because this blog is 5 years old and I cannot easily import these posts in any other system. I have my own news extension for a couple of years, use it in my own projects and happy with it. That ext saved me tons of time that I would have to spend fighting tt_news with all its baseUrl/absRefPrefix/RSS/template/links/pagebrowser issues. I coded the ext in about 3 hours and it has absolutely all that people ask. It is simple, fast, has multiple content elements, single&list, categories, rss. It saves me tremendous amount of time! No tt_news nightmare anymore.



    Regarding the patch. I do not think tt_news should be patched anymore. I think it should go. So it does not make sense to make patches for it.



    Hopefully, your ext will take place of tt_news in the coming years and tt_news will die with all its problems.



    I am good :) I am ok :)

    ReplyDelete

  3. so share your masterpiece of code ...

    ReplyDelete

  4. No. That's not for sharing :) Not everything is for sharing in this world. I shared a lot already.

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  5. I totally agree to you dmitry.

    Thanks.

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  6. Hello Dmitry.

    I am working on typo3 and i need to do pagination in extbase.

    will you be able to help me.?

    Thanks in advance.

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  7. Please, ask for help in TYPO3 mailing lists. There is a special list dedicated to Extbase.

    ReplyDelete

  8. Thanks a lot.

    I tried using widget.paginate view helper but still i didnt got it correct.

    Ill definitively do the needful.

    ReplyDelete

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