Just from reading the subtitle of the book which is “Over 50 great recipes for effectively managing multimedia content to create an organized website in TYPO3″ I would never have guessed how advanced techniques this book shows. This book is definitely for the experienced TYPO3 user who already built some TYPO websites, has at least basic understanding of TypoScript, knowledge about PHP and basic knowledge about the TYPO3 Core API would also be good.  For some recipes from this book you definitely need more than a shared hosting account because you need to install some special applications.

In my opinion this book has more than kept its promises. You will learn much more than just organizing multimedia content. For example in one chapter you will learn how to work with externals services as Amazon S3 to organize your DAM files, the YouTube API to get videos or flickr to upload images.
The chapter I liked the most is about creating services with TYPO3. You will learn how to extract metadata from OpenOffice documents, how to convert videos to FLV or convert your audio files. Of course you need shell access to install some applications. The book only describes the procedure for Debian systems. If you are not familiar with the Linux shell you might get stuck here and ask Google for further information.
As I’m a big fan of automation I also liked the last chapter about automating processes which also covers geolocation support.

Overall I liked the book and can recommend it to developers who like to have a deeper look into TYPO3 and its possibilities to extend the basic system. I think it will be useful in the future for me to get some inspiration from the recipes or just grab some snippet. For some developers without Linux knowledge or limited access it might be hard to follow some steps.

View the table of contents

View a sample chapter

Here you can buy the book!

A couple days ago I had my first experience with Apache Ant. If you have never heard of it before you should definitely check it out. Apache Ant is a very simple JAVA-based build tool with xml-based configuration files for automation.

I wanted to automate the process of importing/exporting specific MySQL database tables.In the next step I wanted to update and commit the data to SVN. After a quick research I found the JAVA lib svntask which is based on SVNKit very useful.

The only disadvantage in my opinion is that there is almost no documentation yet. To help other developers to get off on the right foot and save some time I’ll give some examples in the following section.

SVN update example:

<!-- SVN update -->
<target name="svn-update">
	<svn>
		<update
			path="/workspace/path"
			force="false" recursive="false"
		/>
	</svn>
</target>

Optional arguments you can use are recursive(default: true) and force(default: true).

SVN add example:

<!-- SVN add -->
<target name="svn-add">
	<svn>
		<add
			path="/workspace/project"
			force="false"
		/>
	</svn>
</target>

Optional boolean arguments are force, mkdir, climbUnversionedParents, includeIgnored and makeParents(default for all except mkrdir is true).

SVN commit example:

With version 1.0.7 authentication failed for me. So I added the username/password authentication to the commit class. You can get the temporary version here until the next update of svntask.

<!-- SVN Commit -->
<target name="svn-commit">
	<!-- don't store password in property files, use input  -->
	<input
		message="Enter SVN password:"
		addproperty="svn.password"
	 />
	<svn>
		<commit
			path="/workspace/project/trunk"
			commitMessage="Test commit"
			force="true"
			username="user" password="${svn.password}"
		/>
	</svn>
</target>

Optional boolean arguments are keepLocks and force.

SVN ls update example:

<!-- SVN ls -->
<target name="svn-ls">
	<svn>
		<ls
			repository="http://domain.tld"
			path="/svn/repos/project/trunk"
		/>
	</svn>
</target>

Optional argument is delimeter(default: , ).

SVN info example:

<!-- SVN info -->
<target name="svn-info">
	<svn>
		<info
			path="/workspace/project/trunk"
			committedRevisionProperty="revisionVersion"
			authorProperty="revisionAuthor"
			committedDateProperty="revisionDate"
		/>
	</svn>
	<!-- show revision, author and date -->
	<property
		name="version"
		value="At revision ${revisionVersion} by ${revisionAuthor} on ${revisionDate}"
	/>
	<echo message="${version}"/>
</target>

I didn’t use log, status and switch so far. I will post examples if I will use it in the future.

Some useful links:
svntask: http://code.google.com/p/svntask/
Apache Ant project: http://ant.apache.org/