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

Chapter 3. Tools and Editors

TYPO3 provides some development tools to make creating TypoScript code easier. Although these tools do not have the power of a WYSIWYG editor, they can help you maintain an overview. A genuine TypoScript editor is being prepared, and you can find out more about this editor later in this chapter.

Choosing an Editor

Every programmer should be able to work with the tool that is best for him or her. However, with TypoScript this is somewhat difficult. TypoScript code is entered into a text field, which means that the facilities of a traditional editor, such as a search and replace tool, are not available.

If you are not happy with using the TYPO3 text input field, you can work with a plain text editor such as UltraEdit, but you will need a Mozilla-based browser. There is a Mozex plug-in for this at http://mozex.mozdev.org, and you can use this plug-in to specify which editor will be used to create the TypoScript code.

After installation you can specify the desired editor...