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 7. Menus

The previous chapter illustrated the options for creating graphics in TYPO3. Let us now use this knowledge to create menus. Menu creation is the one of the most powerful functions of TYPO3. Text or graphical menus, TYPO3 can do it all.

The page tree that reflects the web page structure serves as the starting point for menus. Page names and their hierarchy are automatically imported from this page tree and the menu is generated based on that information. You are even given options for when you don't want one of the pages from the page tree to appear in the menu. These will be discussed in the course of this chapter.

Available Menu Types

If you believe that only the simplest menus can be created in TYPO3, you are mistaken. In the following sections you will learn how to create all of the possible menu types, what to watch for, and what else is possible.

  • Text menus: Text-based menus can be created with TMENU. This is the simplest type of menu consisting of a combination of text...