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

Creating Graphics Dynamically


The normal integration of graphics is only one of the options and is nothing spectacular. After all, you would not need TypoScript for this, the graphics could be integrated into the design template with completely normal HTML code. TYPO3 really becomes a powerful graphics tool when GIFBUILDER comes into play. This tool allows graphics to be defined and created on the server. If you want, you can insert a graphic and dynamically overlay it with text. GIFBUILDER gives the path to the created graphic as the return value. Knowledge of graphics editing programs like Photoshop is helpful when creating graphics with TypoScript, because here as well levels, positioning, etc. play a decisive role.

To get a feel for graphics creation, take a look at a simple example utilizing GIFBUILDER:

page.20 = IMAGE page.20.file = GIFBUILDER page.20.file { XY = 200,300 10 = IMAGE 10.file = fileadmin/_temp_/logo.gif 10.file.width = 200 20 = TEXT 20.text.field = title 20.offset = 20...