tt_news

1.1. Introduction

1.1.1. What does it do?

Extension for displaying and managing news.  

Features:

1. 3 types of news items: standard news articles, external links and links, pointing to internal pages.

2. Full multilanguage support with TYPO3 since version 3.7.0.

3. News-articles can be related to each other and/or to internal pages. If two news articles are related, the link back to the source article is inserted automatically.

4. The view of the complete news article  (single view) can be splitted to multiple pages. Pagebreaks can be inserted manually by a userdefined "pagebreak token" or after a certain amount of words.

5. All types of mediafiles can be assigned to news-articles.

6. Very flexible news content-element with the following functions: List, Latest, Archive-menu, Single-view, Search, a menu from nested categories (CATMENU) and a special kind of single view: the "version preview".

7. The appearance of the news plugin on the website can easily be changed by editing the html-template.

8. 2 different html templates included: A table-based template which is kown from older tt_news versions and a new CSS-based template (see screenshots below).

9. News-categories, that can be assigned to news (multiple selections possible). Categories can also be nested to each other. News can be selected (or de-selected) for display by their categories or parent-categories.

10. New in version 2.5.0: If the extension xajax is installed, the category trees in BackEnd forms can now be expanded and collapsed. If you have a huge category tree this will speed up the rendering of the tree significantly.

11. New in version 2.5.0: "tt_news category manager" a BackEnd module for managing news categories (located under Web->Info). It shows the complete category tree - of course expandable and collapsable - and offers drag and drop for moving and copying news categories.

12. Category-images and category-titles can act as link to a specific page or function as category-selector.

13. The Single view of an article can show a list of news, having the same categories assigned as the current article.

14. In the BackEnd categories can be used to configure the editing permissions for news records. A list of allowed categories can be configured for a BackEnd usergroup. If a member of this group tries to edit a news record that does have at least one category assigned that is not in this list saving of the record will be disabled.

15. Internal search function with configurable "search fields" (can be combined with the category-selector function to filter results by categories).

16. "Editlock": By activating the checkbox "Restrict editing by non-Admins" a news record can be locked for editing by non-admin users.

17. "Automatic archiving": After a given number of days has passed, news are automatically in the archive, no need to set an archivedate manually for each item.

18. Supports caching and Indexing: If caching is enabled news-articles are indexed by the extension "indexed search".

19. Supports "direct preview": When the "save & view" button in a news record (in the BackEnd) has been pressed the "single view" of this record will be opened on the website. (see section "Page TSconfig")

20. Several possibilities to add user-defined scripts to process the output of the extension f.e. to add your own markers and templateparts. (-> see sections "Configuration/files" and "Extending tt_news" for some examples)

21. Supports export to the following XML-feed formats: RSS 0.91, RSS 2, RDF Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0.

22. Supports versioning for news records (TYPO3 > 3.7.0 & MySQL 4.x required). "Versioning preview" is supported with a special mode of the tt_news content element (VERSION_PREVIEW) which will be available if the extension "version" is installed.

23. "Context sensitive help" (CSH) for all fields in the tt_news and tt_news_cat BackEnd forms.

24. Support for workspaces (TYPO3 4.0 required)

Compatibility

This version of tt_rews requires at least TYPO3 3.8.0 to run, some features require TYPO 4.1 which is recommanded to use.

WARNING !! Do not install this tt_news version on TYPO3 prior to version 3.8.0 because it requires features that are not present in older TYPO3 versions. Don't even try it, because it might break your TYPO3 installation!

The rich-text-editor rtehtmlarea which is shipped with TYPO3 as a system extension collides with the ajax functionality of the tt_news category in TYPO3 versions < 4.1. For this reason the expand/collapse feature is disabled for the category tree in tt_news records in TYPO3 < 4.1 when rtehtmlarea is enabled.

PHP version: tt_news should work on all PHP versions that are also supported by TYPO3 (from 4.1.2 to 5.2.x).

Note: If you use PHP 5.2.0 on your server you'll need TYPO3 4.1 � This PHP version contains a bug that causes PHP to crash when you edit a tt_news content element. TYPO3 4.1 contains a workaround for this bug. For more info see: http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=4678

MySQL version: 3.23, 4.x and 5.x. If you want to use tt_news with the extension "Versioning Management" (extkey: version) at least MySQL 4.0.18 is required:  

Cited from the TYPO3 3.7.0 release announcement (24/09/2004):

"...- DO NOT use the new "version" extension if you are running a MySQL version below 4.0.18! If you do a bug in MySQL will mess up the "Next Autoindex" of tables in the database meaning that unique IDs are raised to nearly 2 billion and you will get a lot of trouble. This is NOT a bug in the versioning extension, but a problem with MySQL which seemingly is fixed in versions only above 4.0.18"