Making a ticker with TYPO3 and the eID

Lately I have played a bit with the eID feature of TYPO3, which is very neat when you want to do something with AJAX. I found another way of using the eId in combination with TYPO3's graphics library

The background for this blogpost is some fun I have had with the eID feature in TYPO3. My girlfriend is pregnant and as a true web-developer, I just had to make a blog about it (http://ann-og-soeren.graviditet-og-barn.dk - sorry, it's danish). But I also discovered that it is very popular to show family and friend a little image that keeps track of the progression of the pregnancy.

I scanned the market and didn't find any danish tickers, and I was not satisfied with the options of the english ones I came across, so I decided to make one myself. The result can be seen in the bottom of this post. Since buzz.typo3.org doesn't allow me to show images from a foreign URL, I can't show you the ticker in action, but go to http://ann-og-soeren.graviditet-og-barn.dk if you want to see the ticker working (in danish). I have made it possible for others (danish people) who want a ticker, to create one here: Create your own ticker.

When I decided to make the ticker, I really wanted to use TYPO3 since the backend administration is a breeze, and the internal image handling capacity is more than sufficient for the job.
What I needed to do was to output an image stream instead of the whole frontend, and in this regard I remembered the eId functionality which Kasper has made a video podcast about. This would allow me to render only the necesarry things instead of the whole frontend.
For the image handling I needed to use the internal functions. Someone recommended me to use the GIFBUILDER object, but I was afraid that this would force me to load the pibase, which I woulnd't need at all. Instead I included the t3lib_stdgraphic class. This class is made for GIFBUILDER so the logic was a bit hard to understand in the beginning, but eventually I understood the meaning behind the madness :)

All in all I'm very happy with the result, and very pleased that TYPO3 could offer me a lot of tools to make this a simple job. If you need to render something, and don't want to start-up the whole front-end, then you should look into the eId.

P.S. the graphics for the ticker is made by a professional, I didn't have the talent myself ;)