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A TechBlog by Torben Hansen


Freelance Full Stack Web Developer located in Germany.
I create web applications mainly using TYPO3, PHP, Python and JavaScript.
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TYPO3 6.2 - Still some problems with newsletter image rendering

I’ve done a lot of TYPO3 4.5 to TYPO3 6.2 migrations the last weeks and struggled with some strange behaviour of TYPO3 6.2 in combination with newsletter pages and the TYPO3 Extensions direct_mail and ** direct_mail_subscription**.

I’m pretty sure, some people might run into the same problems during the usage of TYPO3 6.2 and direct_mail / direct_mail_subscription, so I’ll describe how I solved the most common problems in this article.

Update 01.01.2015

The first two problems are solved now and you can use renderMethod = table in TYPO3 6.2 and 7.x directly with css_styled_content.

Newsletter pages not rendering images

In order to display HTML newsletters in various e-mail clients it is recommended to output the page layout in old-school HTML table design. In order to do so, I use the following TypoScript for images.

tt_content.image.20.renderMethod = table

This renders image-output in table design and enables the editor to set alignments for images in newsletters. In TYPO3 6.0 and 6.1 I had some major problems with using css_styled_content with the renderMethod shown above, so I used to include the css_styled_content configuration for TYPO3 v4.7 as described in my former blogpost.

This all worked fine for TYPO3 sites migrated from 6.x to TYPO3 6.2. With TYPO3 sites, created directly with TYPO3 6.2, this did’nt work any more and images were just not rendered. I spent several hours of debugging to find out, that a setting in the LocalConfiguration.php was the cause for this. Sites, that have been migrated from TYPO3 6.x to TYPO3 6.2 had [FE][activateContentAdapter] enabled in the Install tool.

After I enabled the [FE][activateContentAdapter] for the directly created TYPO3 6.2 sites, images were rendered correctly with the css_styled_content (v4.7) configuration.

Anyway, the install tool shows a warning, that setting activateContentAdapter is slow, so this only seems to be a temporary solution.

In my opinion a better solution would be to use css_styled_content which comes with TYPO3 6.2 and deactivate [FE][activateContentAdapter], but at the time of writing, there is a bug (see problem below) preventing me from using that option.

Image rendering buggy using TYPO3 6.2 css styled content and renderMethod = table

When I tried to debug my former problem with images not being rendered in page output, I also tried to use css_styled_content from TYPO3 6.2 directly. This resulted in the images being rendered incorrectly (see screenshots below).

3 TYPO3 Logos in TYPO3 backend - each with an individial label in the image

The output using css_styled_content with renderMethod = table results in the following output.

Resulting image output shows 4 images and only the last image is rendered

This seems to be a problem in TYPO3 6.2 and there is also an issue on Forge for this one. I will try to create created a patch, so both the linked and related issues can be closed.

Newsletter not sent to recipient

The last problem I spent some time with is, that newly subscribed recipients did not receive the sent newsletter. As I only send out HTML newsletters, I used to set the following TypoScript in the configuration for ** direct_mail_subscription**

plugin.feadmin.dmailsubscription {
  create {
    overrideValues.module_sys_dmail_html = 1
  }
}

It seems, that this does not work with the latest versions of direct_mail_subscription, so newly created records in tt_address did not contain the nescecary flag. I tried several other approaches including setting hidden input fields for the field mod_sys_dmail_html to the registration form and setting TCAdefaults, but all approaches did’nt work. At least the issue is known, so a fix for this problem may be available soon.

To work around this issue, I set the default value for the field mod_sys_dmail_html to 1 directly in the database by using the following SQL

ALTER TABLE `tt_address` CHANGE `module_sys_dmail_html` `module_sys_dmail_html` tinyint(3) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '1';

Make sure, that this setting may be reverted, if you use the database analyzer in the install tool and apply the original default value for the field.