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

Design Templates versus Templates


There is often confusion about the two terms templates and design templates: Either the term design template is not found at all or it is treated as an equivalent to template. Both of these uses are wrong. A design template is actually a normal HTML file. Its only special feature is that it has placeholders in the pattern of ###CONTENT### or ###CONTENT### This is the content ###CONTENT###. It doesn't matter what the ultimate configuration of the HTML page is—you can base it on table layouts or modern CSS design.

Templates are completely different because they deal with dynamic page definitions. The next chapter will look at templates in more detail. At least a basic knowledge of TypoScript is needed to work with templates. But first we would like to introduce the principle of design templates.