Book Image

Mastering TypoScript: TYPO3 Website, Template, and Extension Development

Book Image

Mastering TypoScript: TYPO3 Website, Template, and Extension Development

Overview of this book

Free, open-source, flexible, and scalable, TYPO3 is one of the most powerful PHP content management systems. It is well suited for creating intranets and extranets for the enterprise. While providing an easy-to-use web interface for non-technical authors and editors of content, its messaging and workflow system enable shared authoring and collaboration. TYPO3 provides flexible and powerful interfaces for both content editors and administrators, giving them full control of the core aspects the system. However for developers who need to customize the system, TYPO3 offers a powerful configuration language called TypoScript. Good knowledge of TypoScript is really a prerequisite for implementing complex applications with TYPO3 and gives developers full control over the configuration of TYPO3 and its template engine. TypoScript enables the complete output template to be created and manipulated, giving you full control over the layout of the site. TypoScript also allows you to integrate dynamic contents, JavaScript-based menus, Flash, Graphics, etc. with ease. You have maximum control over the design of the website and can control all options that would otherwise be addressed by HTML-simple text output, formatting, and much more. TypoScript also allows you to generate graphics at run time and display different content dynamically.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering TypoScript: TYPO3 Website, Template, and Extension Development
Credits
About the Author
Preface

What is TypoScript?


Obviously TypoScript is not a normal programming or scripting language, and yet is very powerful. So how do we ultimately classify TypoScript? TypoScript can be used to configure TYPO3; it can thus be described as a configuration language for which no programming knowledge is necessary. In contrast to true programming or scripting languages, TypoScript lacks elements (such as loops) that are typical of such languages. In fact, TypoScript consists of configuration instructions that are incredibly simple in structure and are reminiscent of CSS in their simplicity (with respect to their syntax and not the effect).

How TypoScript is structured can be seen with the help of the TypoScript Object Browser tool. For this, go to Web | Template and select the TypoScript Object Browser menu from the drop-down list.

Here you can see the TypoScript objects in a clear tree structure. You will learn more about the TypoScript Object Browser and the objects on the following pages.