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 5. Templates

You are probably familiar with the concept of templates from other content management systems. The basic principle of TYPO3 templates is, however, somewhat different and more comprehensive. For example, it has its own language—TypoScript—that is used to generate templates.

The Concept of Templates

The importance of TYPO3 templates is underlined by the fact that it is not possible to display pages from the TYPO3 project without them. The following tasks are performed by templates:

  • Integration of design templates

  • Definition of the page properties

  • Menu generation

  • Dynamic generation of images

  • Integration of extensions

How the templates address these tasks is explained in the following sections.

Hello World!

Templates can be created and managed using the Web | Templates module. When this module is called up for the first time in a project, no templates will be displayed on the right-hand side of the screen. In order to create a new template, click on the Create template for a new...