Day 12: kiss my backend

The day of extensions:

Today I spent the first half of the day trying to make the mm_forum not suck, the front-end module suck less, and to extend the functionality of my self-built "Snowboard Teacher" extension. I used only online documentation, and now I am going to share my wisdom with you.

I discovered that with the front-end login extension ("felogin"), the extra sub-page "Login Status", which serves as a target for redirection after a successful login or failed login, did not only NOT work in a sensible way, but was also pretty much unecessary.

Clicking on the "Members Only" page and selecting the "List" module, you can click on the page content for the login form. There, under the "Plugin" tab, there is a subtab for messages. Why create extra pages and redirect to these pages after successful login, failed login, logout, etc., when you can just click on the "Messages" subtab of "Plugin" and write these messages in text? There are "Header" and "Text" fields for "Welcome", "Login Success", "Login Error", "Status", "Logout" and even "Forgot Password".

I entered values for these, deleted the "Login Status" subpage, and tried out the login anew. It works intuitively, unlike the previous workflow of redirecting to pages after these different events. Additionally, you can set up the same thing for the English-language version of the same page-content. Everything is in ONE place, on ONE page, and flows very logically. For this particular use-case, I can highly recommend using the "Messages" subtab of the Login plugin rather than setting up seperate pages for redirect.

I then edited the Login Form template, "felogin_template.html" in "user_uploads", so that it was a bit more orderly and not so... ugly. You can set which template is going to be used for the login formular from the "List" module by clicking on the page content, then the tab "Plugin", and then the subtab "General". Something I found out while editing the template file is that if you edit it directly, after saving, you need to re-select this template from the "General" tab before clearing the cache and refreshing the frontend. Whyever.

The second thing I worked on today was the missing moderator section of the mm_forum. The online documentation for it under http://typo3.org/extension-manuals/mm_forum isn't that great, but it gave me enough insight to figure out how to set this up. Namely, you need to set up either another page (as a sub-page of "Forum") or set a new content area in the "Forum" page itself.

In the content area, select as content type "Plugin". Then as plugin type, select "mm_forum::Forum". After this selection, you will be presented with a dropdown of what to display on this page. Pick "List post queue". If you've done this on the same page as the forum, as I did, and log on as a user with moderation rights (and the forum is set up to have comments moderated before they are published), you will now see an administrative area for moderators ABOVE the forum. This is kind of busy-looking, so I think that I will set up the admin area on its own page instead.

Something else I discovered is that the reason no users showed up in the "mm_forum" module in the "Install" / "User Administration" area is that users will only do so if they are marked as "ForumUser". It doesn't matter if they are also marked as "ForumMod" or "ForumAdmin"! Once you do this, they appear in the "User Administration" area of the forum and can be edited from there.

mm_forum offers several functionalities that apparently must all be set up in a similar way to what I just described: as a mm_forum plugin content area, either on its own site (a sub-site of "Forum"), or on the "Forum" site itself. I'm going to use this knowledge to try and set up all the functionalities as a way to practice.

The final thing I did (with the first half of the day) was to try to extend my self-made "Snowboard teacher" extension. I added a new property to the teacher model in the extension builder, changed the template for listing them out, and took a while to figure out that after saving all these changes, I needed to deactivate (not remove!) and reactivate the extenstion with the "Extension Manager".

Four hours later... 

Four insanity-inducing hours of trying to set up a user registration form for the mm_forum. Here's what I did right and wrong. So, so wrong:

First: you need to set up a new page for forum user registration. Hide it from the menu. Add the content type "Plugin" and then under the "Plugin" tab, give it a "mm_forum" type plugin. After saving this, you can choose what's to be shown on the page: "mm_forum::User Registration". That was the easy part. The hard part is remembering to set up an extension template for this page, "edit the whole template", and in the "includes" tab, to include the following styles in the following order (otherwise, you will get only a page with a title and nothing else):

mm_forum Javascript: Prototyp
mm_forum
mm_forum Stylesheets
Page browser

I had a huge problem with how to set up a link to the forum user registration from the forum logon page (for non-logged in users). I looked around the backend for a LONG time, thinking (illogically?) that this could be configured within the mm_forum module, just as it's possible to configure whether the "forgot password" and "change password" links show up in the forum login form. No such luck.

Another problem is that in the root template, thanks to the tutorial, I've overwritten the default functionality of page headers so that they can no longer display links through their configuration mask. I finally decided just to add a new type of page content underneath the forum login formular: plain old text. In the Rich Text Editor, I simply wrote "Register for the forum", highlighted it, and made it a link to the forum user registration page within the editor itself.

Problem solved. Next problem: in the forum user registration form, there's a whole bunch of labels, but no Captcha (which I specified should be shown), and NO TEXT FIELDS next to the labels! I searched for hours why this could be and eventually just went into the template and deleted 2 marks surrounding the input fields - ###DEFUSERFIELDS###. After deleting these marks, the input fields showed up and I could fill out the form and submit it. It takes forever to validate, but at least it works. I can't believe I spent the whole second half of the day on this, but now I know the backend pretty damn well, at least.

Quick update: the validation email that arrives after having filled out the forum user registration form has only the following text:

Hallo,
vielen Dank für deine Anmeldung auf

Wow - GREAT. Looks like I'll be working on this on Monday, too.

Kiss my backend, Typo3.