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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:

After requiring the package with Composer you must activate the extension key in Extension Manager, or call:

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:

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:

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.