Awesomeness of Open-Source

By: Georg Ringer

Open-Source is more than a buzzword!

This article describes one aspect why Open-Source can be so much better and how a product can be improved by everyone in such a short time.

Identify the issue

A client of us reported an issue about missing preview texts in the page module if using Japanese chars. As it worked fine for german or english text I could be pretty sure that this problem is related to UTF-8. The cause was the usage of the PHP function chunk_split() which is not binary safe. 

As a next step I searched for "typo3 forge wordWrapper" and found the issue #15797 which has been created over 7 years ago.

Fixing it

The proposed solution was not satisfying and chunk_split() is still not binary safe. However the web evolves and it was pretty easy to solve the task by some lines of CSS.

The change was pushed to the review server and after some changes, the 5th patch set has been merged to the core and backported to 6.1 (Thanks guys). 

Conclusion

In total I needed less than 1 hour for fixing this issue for our customer and for the rest of the TYPO3 community. This is what I really love! It can be so easy to improve an Open-Source product!

I know that not every bugfix is that simple or solved that fast.

Thanks to www.cyberhouse.at making it possible to improve TYPO3!

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