Breaking: #92529 - All Fluid widget functionality removed

See forge#92529

Description

First things first: All fluid widgets and all widget functionality have been removed!

The most important issue of fluid widgets is, that they initiate sub requests to a controller from inside the view and output their content. Those sub requests bring another layer of complexity to the TYPO3 world that is impossible to handle properly as many bug reports show. TYPO3 already uses some kind of namespacing for url query arguments to separate arguments for different plugins on a single page. Widgets introduced another layer which made it necessary to yet again introduce namespacing in the existing namespace.

To make fluid widgets work, they need to work on the request object of the parent plugin, i.e. the one that renders the view which holds the widget. This is a problem regarding our efforts using PSR-7 request objects in Extbase which are immutable by definition.

A special kind of widget is the ajax widget which introduced even more complexity. One example was the already removed auto complete widget. The widget could be used to fetch values from the database for autocompletion while entering a textfield in a form. In order to perform that kind of magic, fluid came with a new page type (7076) for handling incoming ajax requests. Since that endpoint didn't know about the specifics of the widget that should be rendered, the widget context had to be serialized before the ajax request, bound to the user with a unique id and stored in the users session data just to be unserialized moments later to have a back reference to initiating request.

The fluid widgets violated the design pattern "separation of concern" to a degree that they caused more trouble than benefit. Therefore, fluid widgets have been removed from TYPO3 core.

Impact

  • All fluid templates that used an existing widget will no longer work as expected.

  • Also, all custom widgets of users will no longer work and have to be replaced with custom solutions.

Affected Installations

All installations that either used widgets defined by the core or those installations that created own widgets.

Migration

There is no simple migration strategy for all widgets but the most common functionality (pagination) can be solved with a new pagination core api. The main difference compared to a widget is that the pagination has to be initialized in the controller action and not in the view.

For all other widgets, custom solutions have to be found.