I didn’t post for a while because i am busy with my project wich involves building a website using Typo3 as foundation and several extensions for Typo3 like sr_freecap and powermail. What prompted this post is the numerous problems i encountered using the mentioned open source software.
1) The latest Typo3 releases are plagued by bugs, serious bugs. After the announcement that they discovered some serious security problems in the Typo3 core they released a new version: Typo3 4.2.4. As any user concerned with security i upgraded immediately to this version. And the problems started to appear. I discovered this when the extension sr_freecap stopped accepting valid captcha codes claiming everything i enter is invalid. I traced this back to a session storage problem in a short amount of time.
It seems that Typo3 4.2.4 introduced a very serious bug that prevents session data to be stored in user session if the developer uses Typo3’s internal methods to store session data. In the bug report there is a workaround for this at least until the bug is fixed. Otherwise you need to downgrade to Typo3 4.2.3 which as we know has security issues. I applied the workaround for now, waiting for a new version.
I read today that they released version 4.2.5 to fix this regression, but new reports already emerged claiming that this fix introduces other problems. So i will wait a bit before upgrading to 4.2.5
2) Extension sr_freecap (version 1.1.0) will not work togheter with certain versions of powermail (version 1.4.6). More exactly if you install powermail 1.4.6 then sr_freecap will stop showing the captcha image. After removal of the powermail extension, it will work again. I didn’t tried to look into more details about this because i really don’t need that much the powermail extension, so i just removed it.
3) After a while the sr_freecap extension started to throw me the message: “Sorry, service is interrupted“. In fact this is not a bug. It was my mistake because i entered invalid captcha codes and went beyond the default 100 maximum attempts to enter an invalid captcha. The setting can be found in the file ext_typoscript_constants.txt just look for maxAttempts and set it to a higher value for testing. After you finished your site, you can set it back to a lower value.
I hope this helps other developers who encounter these issues.
Laszlo Bodor
