While developing and reviewing TYPO3 extension, you occasionally come upon pretty funny and sometimes disturbing stuff. At some point we all have to learn new things. So we can't expect it all to go right and well from the start.

Sometimes, the normal approach for adding extra fields to a table will just not do. For example, if you don't really know what the other table is going to be. I came across this challenge some days ago. I was working on my sitemaps extension and wanted to have some nice options to use inside Google Sitemaps. To keep it flexible I didn't want to predefine the tables. So how do we add fields to a table, without actually adding them to a table?

When designing and creating cool and fast web applications, a technique called AJAX is commonly used to provide the user with a nice and smooth workflow. It allows the user to get new information from the server-side, without having to deal with page reloads. TYPO3 has some cool features that allow you to easily combine AJAX with TYPO3, to make awesome web applications.

When there are no hooks available to get the job done, it's most of the times possible to extend core and extension classes by using XCLASS. This article will describe the steps that need to be taken to do so.

We all know TYPO3 supports multiple languages in as well the frontend as the backend. But this flexibility is for some major corporate websites not enough. Recently I had to deal with one that had 43 different localizations.

Ever wondered how to create nice warnings, errors and notices in your own TYPO3 back-end modules and extensions? The way TYPO3 itself does this?

I'm working currently on a project, where I wanted to display a nice notice above the form when editing a content record. Now I could have done some hooking and marker overwriting.. but why not just use something that already exists? :-) If you have used 4.3.x already you've probably seen something similar around.

I will use an example extension that I have created prior to writing this article. It's allows you to clear RealURL's cache quickly, through the "Clear cache" menu. Which might be useful for testing or reconfiguring.

A while back we a colleague of mine discover this sweet extension in the TER, after experimenting with it a little we discovered that it was actually quite cool and very useful! Basically, it allows you to reset and rearrange any TCA settings with TypoScript through Page TSconfig.

In my daily line of work I develop TYPO3 websites. Creating a website usually involves grabbing something from the TER, now because some customers have very... let's say 'exclusive' wishes ;-) what we find is not always what we really need. Most of the times we have some overkill features, or worse.. missing features.

Imagine all the time you will put into trying to reverse engineer what the DBAL wrapper function you use is trying to generate, when we could just print ANY query that was generated with ANY one of the DBAL wrappers!