inline_page_editing
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TYPO3 Extension - Inline editing of content elements in backend page module
TYPO3 Extension: Inline Page Editing
Converts the content element preview area into a click-to-edit integration. Clicking the content element opens an edit form with a select set of form fields which can be defined in TCA.
Credits
The main body of work for this extension was sponsored by Systime A/S who publish interactive educational material. They required a usability improvement for their many editors - which they commissioned me to execute and then kindly allowed me to contribute this back to the community in the form of this extension. Thanks, Systime!
What does it do?
It does inline editing in the TYPO3 backend
It also presents the new content wizard as an in-page drop-down menu
Installation
The extension is only available for installing using Composer:
composer require namelesscoder/inline-page-editing
After requiring the package with Composer you must activate the extension key in Extension Manager, or call:
./typo3/cli_dispatch.phpsh extbase extension:install inline_page_editing
The extension has no dependencies (except for TYPO3 CMS) and works for TYPO3 CMS 7.6 LTS and upward.
Configuration
The configuration for this extension exists exclusively in TCA and any modifications or additions must be
added to TCA as well. The extension ships with core defaults in Configuration/TCA/Overrides/tt_content.php
and these defaults can be changed and extended either by a second extension (recommended) which defines
inline_page_editing
as a dependency extension (to cause correct loading order); alternatively it is
possible to override these in typo3conf/AdditionalConfiguration.php
(which you can also write to using
the lowlevel
system extension's backend module).
There are two possible target definitions which require different configurations. One for regular content element types and one for plugins (which share one content type and have an additional sub type).
For regular content types:
$GLOBALS['TCA']['tt_content']['types']['textmedia]['inlineEditedFields'] = 'header,bodytext';
Note that the types
array is used and the CType
is the index. The array (which normally contains just
showitem
with a list of fields the content type shows) receives an added inlineEditedFields
index which
contains a plain CSV list of TCA field names that must be shown, in the order to show them.
Any content type can be configured, including those you add yourself. However, default configuration is only provided for core content types - to enable editing for custom content types you add configuration for each.
And for plugins (list_type
) sub-types:
$GLOBALS['TCA']['tt_content']['types']['list']['my_plugin']['inlineEditedFields'] = 'header,pi_flexform';
Note the additional index my_plugin
which you must set to your plugins so-called signature. For Extbase
plugins the signature is generated using extensionkey_pluginname
Where extensionkey
is the target
extension key without underscores - and pluginname
is the name of the plugin as defined in the plugin
registration (for legacy reasons you often see Pi1
and so on in these names).
If you are in doubt about which plugin signature a particular plugin uses you can insert an instance, note
the UID of the content element and look up the list_type
value in the database directly.
Known issues
Remarkably enough there are no major conflicts; rich text editing works, hooks will still trigger, access restrictions (exclude fields) are respected, record locking/unlocking happens correctly and TCA overrides are fully supported, as are custom fields added by extensions.
There are however some minor issues stemming from the framework integration:
- TCA
displayCond
is not respected due to the way TYPO3 works when editing a list of specific columns. This behavior matches what happens when you click the top-of-column edit icon in the "list" module to edit a specific column of all shown records and can be considered per-design, albeit not fully intuitive. - Previews had to be recreated for some content types, causing them to display slightly different from the normal content previews. The technical reason for this is the HTML DOM structure that is output when generating custom previews vs. letting the core generate them: nesting is different when a hook is not responsible for rendering. A fix can be expected for this in the future.