Disclaimer

I just brought the site back to life so that people can stop reminding me that it's down. Please note that probably most if not all content is outdated. I'll try to update stuff as soon as possible.

best Ingo

Blogging with TYPO3

Well, this is about how it came to my mind to do this blog extension.

Actually it started in September/Oktober 2004 when I was planning to do studies abroad. Finally I made my way to the University of Wisconsin Platteville, Wisconsin, USA and soon I was in the need of a more powerfull homepage.

As I already had experience with TYPO3 I decided to redesign my homepage and use TYPO3 as backend. Honestly: TYPO3 is way too big for a small homepage, but I see it more as a kind of playground and a place where I can show what I have done with TYPO3 already besides other things of my portfolio.

So it was March '05 finally and my new homepage was online, yeah! As I just wanted to keep my buddies informed what's going on in the states I needed a news system or even better a BLOG!

Why not choose the already existing ee_blog extension? By a reason I don't know I don't like the extension and as I'm pretty familiar with tt_news and I contributed some work to it already like the first tableless layout and the rss feed thingy I know tt_news is very powerfull.

A time ago there was a post by Valery Romanchev in typo3.projects.tt_news saying that he modified the "Modern Guestbook" extension in a way that one can use it as commenting system for tt_news. WOW - comments, that's what I wanted, too but I did not want to configure the whole tt_news + chc_forum solution which was available as an alternative just for comments. So when the time came to put my homepage together I applied these changes to the latest version of modern guestbook. So now we were able to post and comment - some really essential things for a blog I guess ;-)

The next steps were to implement other features like trackback, pingback and so on. The code for trackback and other features are taken from other open source systems and libraries as far as they met the needs.

The concept

The extension key TIMTAB was actually chosen by purpose. It was meant to be similar to TIMTAW. TIMTAW means "TYPO3 Is More Than A Wiki (but now offers wiki functionality, too)" and so TIMTAB means "TYPO3 Is More Than A Blog (but now offers blog functionality, too)".

The main idea is to use the features supplied by other TYPO3 extensions already and just to add the missing features which make a blog. So TIMTAB depends on other extensions and thus does not reinvent the wheel. It is built on top of mainly two extensions, News (EXT:tt_news) for entering and editing the blog posts and Modern Guestbook (EXT:ve_guestbook ) to comment the posts. In the beginning we also had an eye on XMLRPC Server (EXT:xmlrpc_server) but dropped that as it didn't met our needs. Optionally one can also use RealURL (EXT:realurl) to get human readable URLs but this no must but more a recommendation.

TIMTAB uses hooks in tt_news to insert own markers to display the comments count for example. Further tt_news is extended to have a fourth type 'Blog Post' which has another tab containing blog specific information like trackbacks, en/disabling pings and comments for a specific post and so on.

At the moment there're two accompanying extensions: One to show photos from your flickr account and one to show your latest del.icio.us bookmarks.



The concept of TIMTAB

Ingo Schommer started working with me on this extension, he did the initial implementation of the metaWeblog API. I know him from my studies in Dieburg and from the Darmstadt TYPO3 User Group - DaTUG meetings.

wish / ToDo list

when I was talking to Ingo we put together a list of things we'd like to have in the extension:

Please notice that this list is not ordered by priority nor strives for completeness.

item is under development

item is under investigation

item is finished

help wanted

item is deferred

new

link resources

progress

Here is what's working already:

2005-12-30

2005-10-31

2005-10-30

2005-10-29

2005-10-25

2005-10-20

2005-09-21

2005-09-05

2005-08-24

2005-08-23

2005-08-08

2005-08-01

2005-07-21

2005-07-18

2005-07-17

2005-06-27

2005-06-25

2005-06-11

2005-06-03

2005-05-30

2005-04-24:

2005-04-15:

2005-04-13:

2005-04-12:

2005-04-10:

2005-04-03:

2005-04-02:

2005-03-31:

Nightly Build

T3X_timtab-0_6_0-dev-z-200604151416.t3x

Ready for TYPO3 4.0.0, please test wether trackbacks are working when writing posts from blog tools like w.bloggar.

152 K

class.t3lib_parsehtml.zip

Patched version of class.t3lib_parsehtml.php needed for Trackback Autodiscovery from other Blogs. Just overwrite the original file.

14.2 K

Donate

If you enjoy using this extension and/or would like to see it enhanced, please donate a buck or two ... or fifty. I will use the money to keep my development hardware and software updated. If I had a girlfriend I would buy her dinner so she lets keep me working on this stuff for free and doesn't comlain.

You can also check my amazon wishlist if you don't like making donations via paypal.