Many times, when taking a short peek through new extensions in the TER, I find plenty of extensions that use PHP's native MySQL functions to access the database. In my previous post I already described why this something wrong, and why you should avoid it. In this article I will show you how it should be done, and how you can write less and cleaner code by doing so.

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 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.