Scaffolding for the Extbase Kickstarter

By: Sebastian Kurfürst

I'm working again on the Extbase Kickstarter - namely on the Scaffolding of Controllers and Templates. Check out the screencast!

If you want to watch the video, go to Vimeo!

After quite a long TYPO3 break for me where I got some new ideas and tried out some different technologies, I finally wanted to do some TYPO3 work again - and thought about how to make the Extbase Kickstarter more feature-complete. I tackled Scaffolding, as I believe this is what is badly missing.

Scaffolding is the automatic generation of Create, Update, List, and Delete-functionality based on a model. That is, when you start with developing your model, you normally don't care about the template or your controllers, but you want it to "just work".

I've built a special base controller called "Tx_ExtbaseKickstarter_Scaffolding_AbstractScaffoldingController", which the kickstarter will now automatically use as base class in new controllers. This controller on-the-fly creates fluid templates for listing, creation, and editing of domain objects, based on the properties of the domain object. Thus, if you modify your domain object (and the Database and TCA in parallel), the frontend output will automatically adjust; making quick model changes easily possible.

As your model matures, there will be a point in time where you start working on the frontend output, and the templates. At this point, you'll want to explicitly write the fluid templates to disk, and start with them. This still needs to be implemented.

I've created a screencast explaining the current state of this feature! I'd love to hear feedback to you, best via the typo3.projects.typo3v4mvc newsgroup.

Greets,
Sebastian