TYPO3

TYPO3 is a free and open source content management system as well as a Model–view–controller (MVC) Web Application Development framework written in PHP. It is released under the GNU General Public License. It can run on Apache or IIS on top of Linux, Microsoft Windows, OS/2 or Mac OS X.

History

TYPO3 was initially authored by Kasper Skårhøj. It is now developed by two teams. The maintenance tree, version 4.x, team leader is Michael Stucki. The development tree, version 5.x, team leader is Robert Lemke.

Many of TYPO3's pluggable extensions have been written by third party developers.

Features

Along with a set of ready-made interfaces, functions and modules TYPO3 has a large repository of extensions, allowing flexibility and extendibility. More than 4000 extensions are available for download under the GNU General Public License from a repository called the TYPO3 Extension Repository, or TER.

TYPO3 has a web frontend, which presents a TYPO3 based website to its users, along with a web based backend, used by authors and site administrators to manage content for the website. TYPO3 can run on Apache or IIS on top of Linux, Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X. It uses PHP 4 or 5 (starting with TYPO3 4.2.0 all releases will require at least PHP 5.2) and Any database system supported by the TYPO3 DBAL including MySQL,Oracle, PostgreSQL and others. The system can be run on any web server, with a modern CPU and 256 MB RAM. The frontend can be displayed in browsers such as Mozilla Firefox on any OS, with JavaScript

Design

The system is based on templates. People can choose an existing template and change features such as logo, colors, and fonts, or they can construct their own templates using a configuration language called TypoScript. In this simple notation, a large object tree structure of information is created with placeholders for data from the database to fill in. Preprogrammed objects are configured by changing or adding values or features. This object tree structure is saved in a text file. Various editors are available to change the content in a structured way. The PHP generator uses this data structure to drive the generation of the content. Besides conditions, TypoScript has no other control structures; if real processing must be performed, it is handed to a PHP function. The top level object is the PAGE object. There are various types of MENU objects.

Syntax of TypoScript

The basic syntax is:

[objectpath].[attribute]  [operator]  [value]

Operators are

• = assignment of a value
• < copy a whole object
• =< insert a reference
• > remove object

Examples:

myObject.attribute1=Hello

The content is mainly stored in two tables: one table called pages and another called tt_content, which holds the elements contained in a page. Every page object has a unique identification key (uid) and is linked to a parent page. Thus, the pages are organized in tree form, allowing the system to easily generate menus and site maps.

One key feature of TYPO3 is that it has a flexible application programming interface which enables independent developers to provide extra functionality. Modules using this API are called "extensions" and many developers provide their extensions in a publicly available repository on the TYPO3 developer portal.

TemplaVoila

TemplaVoila is an alternative template engine extension for TYPO3. A graphical mapping tool for creating templates is included, an alternative page module, the ability to create flexible content elements and an API for developers. New content element types can be created without programming.

TemplaVoila facilitates more flexibility for maintaining web pages than TYPO3's standard templating, while making it possible to enforce a strict corporate design and allowing editors to work with content more intuitively. On the other hand, it is also slower than the standard templating.

See also

• Content management
• Content management system
• List of content management systems
• TCPDF library for generating PDF documents with TYPO3

Further reading

• Rene Fritz, Daniel Hinderink, Werner Altmann – TYPO3: Enterprise Content Management (Paperback) – ISBN 1-904811-41-8
• Michael Peacock – Building Websites with TYPO3 (Paperback) – ISBN 1-847191-11-8

External links

• TYPO3.com: Official Website
• Project Homepage (Dev.)
• TYPO3 Forge - SVN Repository, Bugtracker, Documentation and Wiki for TYPO3 Core and Extensions
• TYPO3 Wiki
• 51 TYPO3 sites which you may not have known were TYPO3 based
• TYPO3 Videos for Editors (Series of 22 TYPO3 video tutorials to version 4.2) - supplemented by a TYPO3 test web site