The new version of the Google sitemap extension just appeared in TER. Earlier this extension was meet very enthusiastically by the community. This version fixes some issues reported by users. In particular these issues were fixed:

* if root page is a shortcut, sitemap will be truncated to a small amount of pages

* tt_news sitemap is empty if home page is a shortcut or if the news sysfolder is outside of the web site root

* tt_news articles are not indexed by Google

The first two points are simple. I describe how to avoid the shortcut...

Addison–Wesley will publish a German version of my 'TYPO3 extension development' book. They already have a page for this book. The cover looks excellent. I like it much more than the English version.

Inside the article you will also find a photo of the book and some information in German.

Normally increasing web site performance means buying better hardware or playing with Apache, MySQL and operating system settings. Certainly better hardware can make the site perform faster. Unloading some Apache modules and tuning Apache settings will help too. Optimizing MySQL also helps. It all helps but it costs a lot too. Hardware is costly and server optimization is costly.

What can be done to improve the web site performance without upgrading hardware?

The idea

The idea lies in the optimizing the output of the page. Some time ago...

TYPO3 fully supports the making of multilanguage web sites. Everyone know the L URL parameter. But what if you want to have a separate domain for each language and keep a single page tree? Until recently it was not easy and required certain TYPO3 black magic. In this article I will describe how to do it in 5 minutes (or less!) and give you a bonus: better site position in Google.

Typically when user switches to another language, the URL changes to contain L var ('&L=1'). In case of RealURL it looks better, URL will...

TYPO3 core uses certain coding conventions. One part of these conventions is Unix line ending and file information block form

Unix line endings

Unix line ending are standard in TYPO3. It is easy to enforce them with SVN. SVN has a property named 'svn:eol', which defines what line endings a file gets during checkout. For TYPO3 core and extensions this property should be set to LF. Here is how to do it from the command line (shell):

svn ps svn:eol LF class.tx_myext_whatever.php

All text files inside the extension should have this...

Today morning I sent a Google map extension to the TYPO3 extension repository. I had it for some time already on this and some other sites of mine.

Sitemaps help Google to index your site better and faster. There are only advantages of having them in the TYPO3 web sites.

There several extensions that implement such functionality. Why yet another extension? Here is why:

it correctly works with config.baseURL, config.absRefPrefix and domain records. Every other extension does not work with at least one of these settings and creates URLs with...

Many years ago when I just started to work with TemplaVoila, I did my objects the same way as many people do: separate DS/TO pairs even if objects are similar. For example, on one site I had three types of recipes and I had three separate DS/TO pairs for them. I should have made a single data source and three different template objects instead.

It would not be difficult to change all template objects to use the same data source (just replace data source id for all flexible content elements). The real problem was that fields in data sources...