February 2011

My back hurts. As with the rest of the United States, my neck of the woods has received more snow and cold weather than one could possibly want for the winter season. Due to the constant snowfall, I have spent a number of my days clearing my driveway from snow with the help of my 15 year old snow blower. Several days ago, the snow blower's auger died on me leaving me with a useless rusting piece of machinery.

Auger Belts

1. Remove the plastic belt cover on the front of the engine by removing two self-tapping screws. See figure 23.

2. Drain the gasoline from the snow thrower or place a piece of plastic under the gas cap.

The face will be familiar to millions, but in the world of Website CMS this trusted global innovation is yet to be seen until now. With the release of Contegro Version 4, comes a Window’s style desktop that will make even first-time Website CMS users feel like experts.

It’s yet another step towards Contegro’s continuing advancement in completely removing the developer from the website life-cycle, and empowering designers with the sole power to create and manage functionally-rich websites. “Contegro Version 4’s interface brings simplicity and usability in Web CMS to a whole new level,” says Contegro founder Vaughan Reed. “The Window’s Desktop interface is already familiar, so for users every action is intuitive.”

Contegro Version 4’s new Interface and multi-tasking workspace concept is set to revolutionise Web CMS. Take a look at the following key feature releases.

A completely transformed CMS interface

Contegro v4 removes the need to open up multiple browser tabs to manage many different areas of a website or even independent sites; everything can be managed from the new interface. “It makes multi-tasking so simple,” says Reed. “The increase in productivity that can be achieved when setting-up and managing sites by using the new interface, is really exciting.”

I received an email from someone that wanted me to talk about TYPO3 Version 4.5 LTS. The suffix “LTS” stands for “Long Term Support”. For the first time a TYPO3 version will be maintained by the TYPO3 Core Team significantly longer than the usual release cycle would suggest. In 2010 TYPO3 has switched to a fixed 6-month release cycle which means up to now support for a version was only provided for 18 months (only three of the latest three versions actively maintained). The LTS versions will be supported for at least 3 years thus offering a good option for users that don’t need or don’t want to update every 6 months.

TYPO3 is used for a great variety of websites ranging from the smallest private homepage up to large multi-server, multi-language enterprise portals. Upgrading for everyone is reported to be easy, since the development team focused on maximum backwards compatibility with older releases. This provides a very easy and stable migration path to TYPO3 Version 4.5 LTS.

Older features are still supported and the use of deprecated features can be easily tracked in a log file. If you're still stuck in the dark ages of the browser war, you'll also want to note that TYPO3 Version 4.5 LTS is the last release to support Internet Explorer 6 for the Backend.

New features and improvements found in TYPO3 Version 4.5 include:

• A fast and flexible pagetree based on, configurable Backend layout and rearranged editing forms for pages and content elements.
• The new LiveSearch box providing instant auto-completion. A similar technology empowers input fields to find connected records in a snap.
• The whole Backend gets an optical facelift. Icons, colors and the general arrangement of elements were streamlined. Many details were fixed to provide a more consistent appearance and workflow.