Matt Bracewell

Been asked by the good people at Packt to review their new TYPO3 book.
It’s been written by Dan Osipov who’s on the TYPO3 DAM team.
I’ve bought their previous titles and been impressed so I’m looking forward  to getting my hands on it.
You just can’t beat a book on your desk at times and Packt share some revenue with the projects concerned – win win!

If you want to save trees there’s an eBook version and a sample chapter is also available.

Complete information for Packt TYPO3 4.3 Multimedia Cookbook.

As I’m somewhat picky about the code produced on my sites I was really keen to remove the comments describing each TYPO3 content element. This is the sort of thing I mean:

<!--  CONTENT ELEMENT, uid:122/textpic [begin] -->
<a id="c122"></a>
<!--  Header: [begin] -->
<div class="csc-header csc-header-n1">
<h2 class="csc-firstHeader">
Time-served Designer & Webmaster available for challenging permanent positions and short-term contracts.
</h2>
</div>
<!--  Header: [end] -->
<!--  Image block: [begin] -->
<div class="csc-textpic-text">
<!--  Text: [begin] -->...</div>

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Increasingly I find myself having to add custom meta data in order to validate my ownership of a site.  Both Yahoo and Google offer webmaster tools with the option of either adding a static html page or including custom meta tags.
Although its easy enough to quickly upload an html file most of my sites would require explicit tweaks to the .htaccess file to allow the plain html to be served.  Without the exception being added the request is caught by the application and a 404 is thrown.

Adding a custom meta tag is therefore the path of least resistance and with a TYPO3 site running TemplaVoila you have two options:

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Wanting to publish an RSS feed on a TYPO3 site recently I ran into errors relating to the php configuration of Dreamhost.  To solve this I followed the instruction for using your own modified version of php.ini on the wiki which essentially copies the latest Dreamhost version of php.cgi and php.ini into a newly created cgi-bin directory.

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I started to get this error while I was monkeying around with the latest version on my MacBook.

Cannot find tslib/. Please set path by defining $configured_tslib_path in index.php.

I had to go as far as to have a quick look at index.php to discover that I’d incorrectly named my typo3 folder (er, symlink actually). D’oh!

On my fresh new virtual machine from Bytemark I’ve installed apache, mysql and everything else needed to run TYPO3 4.02 – and it works! To allow me to delegate some admin procedures I’ve installed webmin and I’ve created some nifty links on my ubuntu desktop that allow me Nautilus access over ssh straight into the filesystem. For everyday admin and setup I find myself preferring the CLI (again over ssh) and I try to test everything beforehand on my “spare” office server.

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