Book Image

TYPO3 4.3 Multimedia Cookbook

Book Image

TYPO3 4.3 Multimedia Cookbook

Overview of this book

TYPO3 is one of the world's leading open source content management systems, written in PHP, which can be used to create and customize your web site. Along with text content, you can display high quality images, audio, and video to your site's visitors by using TYPO3. It is essential to manage various types of multimedia files in content management systems for both editors and the users on the frontend of the site.The book gives you a step-by-step process for organizing an effective multimedia system. It also gives solutions to commonly encountered problems, and offers a variety of tools for dealing with multimedia content. The author's experience in large-scale systems enables him to share his effective solutions to these problems.If you choose to work through all the recipes from the beginning, you will start by setting up a basic web site set up, aimed at future expansion and scalability. Next, you will cover the basics of digital asset management—a major topic important in all enterprises. You can organize user groups because next you will be creating accounts for users and assigning permissions. Then you will jump into metadata—text information describing the multimedia objects—and learn how it can be manipulated in TYPO3. You will embed multimedia on your site when you have read the various methods for embedding mentioned in this book. Before you finish the book you will learn about some advanced topics, such as external API integrations and process automation.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
TYPO3 4.3 Multimedia Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Setting up a web server on Debian


Before we start anything else, we need to set up a web server. The most common setup for TYPO3 is based on a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP), although other setups are supported as well. Next, we will install all the components required by TYPO3 on a Debian Linux server.

Note

Paths may vary depending on system and setup options.

Getting ready

Setting up a Debian server is very easy, because all the packages you need are available through APT (Advanced Packaging Tool). Make sure that the package lists are up-to-date by running:

Shell> apt-get update

How to do it...

Issue the following command while logged in as root:

Shell> apt-get install apache2-mpm-prefork libapache2-mod-php5 php5-gd php5-mysql mysql-server-5.0

Note

At the time of writing, the latest stable version of Apache on Debian (Lenny) is 2.2.9, while PHP is 5.2.6, and MySQL is 5.0.51a. These versions meet the requirements of our system, and don't have any known bugs that prevent TYPO3 from working correctly.

How it works...

APT makes software maintenance easy, as all packages can be upgraded or removed through simple commands. You could install the packages from source, but it would make subsequent upgrades difficult. With APT, you can run the following to update the package cache information and upgrade your system:

Shell> apt-get update
Shell> apt-get upgrade

Note

One could also use the short notation of this:

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

It's highly recommended to do this on a regular basis to apply any security patches. But be careful upgrades could break some functionality!

Note

Make sure you have a backup/failover plan in place before performing any upgrades.

There's more...

We can also install some other components to add additional functionality to our system.

ImageMagick

This line will install ImageMagick on your system.

Shell> apt-get install imagemagick

This installs ImageMagick—a powerful graphic processing program. TYPO3 works with GD and ImageMagick, and you can enable the use of ImageMagick in the Install Tool. As ImageMagick is an external program (unlike GD, which is a PHP extension), it is more efficient and feature-rich when it comes to image processing. Therefore, it's highly recommended that you install and enable it.

An alternative to ImageMagick is GraphicsMagick—a fork of ImageMagick with a more stable API. GraphicsMagick is also more efficient, and performs better than ImageMagick, especially on multi-core processors. No changes to TYPO3 are required to work with GraphicsMagick, and it can be utilized as soon as it is installed by using the following command:

Shell> apt-get install graphicsmagick

To verify that everything is functioning correctly, you can go into TYPO3 Install Tool (available when you install TYPO3 as described in recipe Setting up TYPO3), and select Image Processing to check the configuration, then run some tests, as shown on the following screenshot:

Apache commands

Apache provides a few tools that significantly simplify maintenance tasks. Here are some useful commands:

Shell> a2enmod module_name 
Shell> a2dismod module_name

The first command line (shown above) enables a module while the second command line disables a module (example: mod_rewrite).

Shell> a2ensite site_name 
Shell> a2dissite site_name

The first command line enables a website configuration file while the second command line disables a website configuration file (example: default).

Note

Always put different site configurations in separate files. This way you can be sure that disabling a site configuration will only disable that website, and will not have any adverse effects on the other sites hosted on the server.

Shell> apache2ctl start 
Shell> apache2ctl stop 
Shell> apache2ctl restart

The commands you just saw are used to start, stop, or restart the server respectively. Make sure to restart the server after configuration changes, as they will not take effect (alternatively, you can reload the server).

There are many other resources online to help you set up and optimize the web server. One such resource that also gives some information specific to TYPO3 is http://www.installationwiki.org/Typo3.

See also

  • Setting up a multithreaded environment

  • Creating a scalable architecture

  • Setting up an NFS share