elp’s blog

If you are using the popular extension “tt_news”, you probably want the news title as page title on the single view of the news entries. Especially for SEO and sharing (Facebook, Twitter,…) it is very useful to have this information in the TITLE – tag of the page.

All you have to do is to overwrite the default page title with the custom news title – but it is tricky if you want this behaviour for all configured languages on your page!

I’ll simply post my typoscript configuration here with some comments – if you have further questions, feel free to post them…


#######################

### first check, if we have a news id in the querystring
[globalVar = GP:tx_ttnews|tt_news > 0]

lib.newstitle = CONTENT
lib.newstitle {
table = tt_news
select {
selectFields = title
languageField = sys_language_uid

# id(s) of the page with the tt_news records

pidInList = 120,121
andWhere {

# grab the querystring vars and assign it to uid

data = GP:tx_ttnews|tt_news
wrap = uid = |
}

# define the language

languageField = sys_language_uid

}
renderObj = COA
renderObj {
10 = TEXT
10.field = title
}
}
[global]


Now we have a typoscript object named “lib.newstitle” containing the title
of the current displayed news entry. But CAUTION: this works for the default language only, if we want additional languages, we have to alter the select statement to use the “l18n_parent” id for the given data item:


[globalVar = GP : L = 1,GP : L = 2, ...]
lib.newstitle.select.andWhere.wrap = l18n_parent = |
[global]


Just insert all you configured language ids.
Finally, we have to assign the “lib.newstitle” string to our page (assuming, that our title is configured in page.headerData.10) :


[globalVar = GP:tx_ttnews|tt_news > 0]
page.headerData.10 >
page.headerData.10 = COA
page.headerData.10 < lib.newstitle
page.headerData.10.wrap =
[global]


That’s it – hopefully, this will save some time for you…

This posting is based on version 4.3.3 of typo3.

It is often necessary to display thumbnails with fixed width and height values for each image (e.g. some image gallery…), which is a challenge if you have images of different formats (4:3, 16:9,…).

Typo3 offers the “cropping” function, which means the original image is scaled to a given width and height – to preserve the proportions of the image, it automatically resizes the images to match the given values.

E.g. if you want to scale all images in a content element of type “Image” to 160 x 120, you can use the following Typoscript code:


tt_content.image.20 {
1.file.width.field >
1.file.width = 160c
1.file.height = 120c
1.file.width.override.field = imagewidth
1.file.height.override.field = imageheight
}


It is very important to add the postfix “c” (for crop) to the pixel value.

In a concrete project, i had the challenge to render the thumbnails only for certain “Image” elements, not for the whole site. I chose to use the “Frame” (section_frame) property of the content element. So if you want to apply above settings only to content elements, which fit a defined section_frame value, you can use the following Typoscript:

tmp.CONTENT.HEADER.CONTENT < tt_content.image.10
tmp.CONTENT.IMAGE.CONTENT < tt_content.image.20
tt_content.image = CASE
tt_content.image {
key.field = section_frame
# id of the frame
3 = COA
3 {
10 >
10 < tmp.CONTENT.HEADER.CONTENT
20 >
20 < tmp.CONTENT.IMAGE.CONTENT
20 {
# cropping f. gallery
1.file.width.field >
1.file.width = 160c
1.file.height = 120c
1.file.width.override.field = imagewidth
1.file.height.override.field = imageheight
}
}
# rendering for all other frame values
default = COA
default {
10 >
10 < tmp.CONTENT.HEADER.CONTENT
20 >
20 < tmp.CONTENT.IMAGE.CONTENT
}
}
tmp.CONTENT.HEADER.CONTENT >
tmp.CONTENT.IMAGE.CONTENT >

In the above example, the value 3 is the selected value for section_frame. Its important to copy the existing values to the new COA object and then override the needed settings.

I spent some time to find a solution for this specific problem – hopefully this will help somebody to save some time….

Recently, a weird problem occured in my current typo3 – project. The caching was configured properly (out of the box configuration) and all caching tables were written as they should – but with a very confusing behaviour: the whole page was generated completely new by typo3 on each page request, which caused high server load. The error was not caused by an overriden no_cache-value or one of the other usual suspects (USER_INT, config – directives). After spending days trying to find a fix for the problem, i finally found a solution:

The problem was the configuration of the typo3 – installation, which is set to use utf-8 in the database backend and frontend output. All databse tables were correctly set to utf-8 and the rendering of special chars worked liked a charm – but there seemed to be a missmatch in rendering the page content and generating the cache content. Because of this missmatch, the pages were correctly saved in the table page_cache, but the entry was renewed on every page request. To solve this problem, you have to set the value of the [setDBinit] directive as followed when using utf-8 (either in the typo3 install tool or via localconf.php):

---

[setDBinit]
SET character_set_client = utf8
SET character_set_results = utf8
SET character_set_connection = utf8

---

Normally, the value SET NAMES = utf8 should do the trick, but that didn’t work for me. After setting this value and clearing up the whole system cache, your pages should be served from the cache.

For a complete tutorial how to configure typo3 to use utf-8 consistently, take a look at
http://www.typo3-media.com/blog/article/utf8-and-typo3-updated.html
(this tutorial still uses the “SET NAMES” directive, be sure to change it….)

Typo3 offers a nice feature to edit content elements of a page directly in the preview mode – but this functionality is only available for admins per default. In my projects, it’s important for all users to have this feature. As so many tasks in typo3, it is not very obvious how to enable it – so here is a (very short) tutorial, how it works to add it for backend-groups.

First step – default template

In the default template (which is typically the site’s root), you have to enable the admin panel, which is done by the following command in the typoscript- setup:

config.admPanel = 1

Second step – enable and configure the panel for the usergroup

Switch to the user admin, select a user, who is a member of the group to which you want to add the feature, select the assigned group and press the “edit” symbol. The configuration dialogue for the user group pops up – now select the “options” tab and enter the following typoscript:

admPanel {
enable.all = 1
enable.edit = 1
module.edit.forceNoPopup = 0
module.edit.forceDisplayFieldIcons = 1
module.edit.displayIcons = 1
module.edit.forceDisplayIcons = 1
enable.cache = 1
enable.preview = 1
enable.publish = 1
enable.tsdebug = 1
enable.info = 1
hide = 0
}


This is just an example setting, please refer to the typoscript reference for a complete list of options. After saving, you can switch to an user who is a member of the group, select a page in preview mode – voila  – now you should see a panel where you can move, edit, hide and delete content elements.
If you do not use groups, you can simply set the above typoscript to a single user – but using groups always makes sense.

I hope this saves some time for someone who runs into a similar issue. Thankyou, Rüdiger!