New TYPO3 4.x Coding Guidelines

By: Francois Suter & Michael Stucki

It's been a long wait, but they are finally here: brand and shiny new coding guidelines!

The new TYPO3 Coding Guidelines have finally been released. Some may think that it took a very long time. There are many factors that led to this delay and there's no point in dwelling on this. The important thing is that these new CGLs are out now and must be used for all pending and future patches for TYPO3 version 4.x.

This new version of the TYPO3 Coding Guidelines is not just an update. It is actually a full rewrite undertaken by Dmitry Dulepov and based on notes by Ingo Renner (from a CGL meeting at T3DD08). The final draft was polished by Michael Stucki.

The main reason behind this effort was to simplify this document. The previous versions contained a lot of redundant information that could already be found in other documents such "Inside TYPO3" or "Core APIs". There are probably still some redundancies, but we'll try to sort them out in further revisions. It is also worth mentioning that it is not always easy to sort between true guidelines and just best practices. The latter are now in a separate chapter of the CGLs.

So this new version is really more centered on the coding itself and not on the API. There are some very precise rules in particular about PHP syntax, so make sure you read these guidelines closely. Enjoy these new rules and don't hesitate to make suggestions to improve them in the development mailing list (typo3.dev).

As always these guidelines are meant for Core development, but developers are strongly encouraged to use them inside their own extensions too.