Idea: use individual extensions for themes

[jonaseberle]

I think it makes more and more sense to split off frontend parts from backend functionality. As this leads to a well-defined (even versionable, see below) API between them, themeable extensions like cookieman could profit by a) not breaking 3rd party code and b) by making it easier for theme integrators to judge if and what they need to change.

I would also like to encourage TYPO3 integrators to create smaller new packages/extensions rather than adding everything to their site package. The benefit for the ecosystem is that such a theme extension is directly sharable and publishable.

Rather than having that TypoScript option theme that we use currently, we could have a base extension and extensions for our example themes.

dmind/cookieman could define in composer.json:

  "require": {
    "t3-content/cookieman-fe": "^1.0"
  },
  "provide": {
    "t3-content/cookieman-be": "1.0.0"
  },

and any theme package/extension would define:

  "require": {
    "t3-content/cookieman-be": "^1.0"
  },
  "provide": {
    "t3-content/cookieman-fe": "1.0.0"
  },

t3-content/... is just an arbitrary idea for a vendor. No package with that name will actually exist - its like an interface that is implemented by a package.

Needs to be checked:

• while that circular dependency is ok for composer, it needs to be checked how we can still make sure that the TYPO3 loading order is "cookieman, then theme". That would be needed for overwriting base config, but maybe we can make it so that actually nothing needs to be overwritten.

[kanow]

Hey, please contact me here in github or in TYPO3 Slack (karsten_uk) if you need help to realize the idea with extra frontend for cookieman. We are using an extra foundation 6 template for cookieman in one of aour last projects. I think the split in different extensions is a good idea.

[jonaseberle]

Hi @kanow, thanks for your feedback and offer. Let's talk :)