Hi,

this is the first episode of my "DevBlog". In this series I want to write about the development things I do for the core. Especially for the Install-Tool 2.0 what is my main project at the moment. I will try to write on article each week but I can't promise anything.

As you might now, the sources of the next gen Install-Tool is located on sourceforge.net. It's contained in the TYPO3xdev project and can be checked out via subversion from there. The extension key is "install".

When you check out the current version there, you'll get a very basic extension that replaces your installed Install-Tool. The advantage is, that the current code is installable as local extension. I'm not sure if this will stay until the final version but it makes development much easier at the moment. ;-)

When you open the installer module you will only see some debug messages. So what can you see there? Basically it's just a proof of concept that shows, that we can call various modules that return some result set that has to be parsed later on. The other advantage is, that the result of a module can contain the result-set of another module as sub-result. This feature is one of the basic features we will need for the whole framework. The concept is, that we have a single module for every task. For example an overview that includes the results of various checking modules (database, php, etc.). With this concept we hope to have it strongly modularized what is much easier to maintain and easier to extend.

This basic code exists for some days now because I waited for some feedback. Today I walked on and have done some work on the multilingual features. The current installer is only available in english what is fine in most cases. I think most admins will understand and know what to do. But we wanted to have more than that in the next version.

When you call the installer you will see a simple debug output that does nothing else than printing out a label. This works pretty similar to the default locallang features of TYPO3. Basically it simply uses the methods provided by TYPO3. The only thing we have to do is, to instanciate the language stuff by yourself. Every module can ship with it's own locallang file that will be merged into the global language array when the module is loaded.

The next steps will be to create some view stuff that prints out the results of the modules in a nicer way than it does now. ;-)

Greets,

Thomas