TYPO3

History and usage

TYPO3 was initially authored by the Dane Kasper Skårhøj in 1997. It is now developed by over 300 contributors under the lead of Benjamin Mack (Core team leader) and Mathias Schreiber (Product Owner).

Calculations from the TYPO3 Association show that it is currently used in more than 500,000 installations. The number of installations detected by the public website "CMS Crawler" was around 384,000 by February 2017.

Features

Delivered with a base set of interfaces, functions and modules, TYPO3's functionality spectrum is implemented by extensions. More than 5000 extensions are currently available for TYPO3 for download under the GNU General Public License from a repository called the TYPO3 Extension Repository, or TER.

TYPO3 can run on most HTTP servers such as Apache or IIS on top of Linux, Microsoft Windows or macOS. It uses PHP 5.3 or newer and any relational database supported by the TYPO3 DBAL including MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and others. Some 3rd-party extensions - not using the database API - support MySQL as the only database engine. The system can be run on any web server with a modern CPU and at least 256 MB RAM. The backend can be displayed in any modern browser with JavaScript. There is no browser restriction for displaying user-oriented content generated by TYPO3.

Since version 4.5, TYPO3 is published with a demo website called "Introduction Package". It enables first-time users to get an working example website quickly and to experiment with built-in features. The package can be enabled from the install tool.

System architecture

Conceptually, TYPO3 consists of two parts: the frontend, visible to visitors, and the administrative backend. The frontend displays the web content. The backend is responsible for administration and managing content. The core functions of TYPO3 include user privileges and user roles, timed display control of content (show/hide content elements), a search function for static and dynamic content, search-engine friendly URLs, an automatic sitemap, multi-language capability for frontend and backend, and more.

Like most modern CMSes, TYPO3 follows the policy of separation of content and layout: The website content is stored in a relational database, while the page templates are stored on the file system. Therefore, both can be managed and updated separately.

TYPO3 defines various basic types of content data. Standard content elements are described as text, text with media, images, (plain) HTML, video etc. Various additional types of content elements can be handled using extensions.

The fundamental content unit is a "page". Pages represent a URL in the frontend and are organized hierarchically in the backends' page tree. Standard pages serve as "containers" for one or multiple content elements. There are several additional special page types:

shortcuts (they show content from another page)

mount points (that insert a part of the page tree at the mount point)

external URLs

system folders (to handle complex data such as registered users)

…and more

Internally, TYPO3 is managed by various PHP arrays. They contain all the information necessary to generate HTML code from the content stored in the database. This is achieved by a unique configuration language called TypoScript.

Design elements

Designing and developing with TYPO3 is commonly based on the following elements, among others:

Page tree

Representation of all pages of a site, their structure and properties

Constants

System-wide configuration parameters

Template

Traditionally, a simple HTML skeleton with markers (e.g., „###MARKER###“) and range markers, called subparts (e.g., „<!-- ###CONTENT### Start --> … <!-- ###CONTENT### End -->“); that are replaced by various content elements: navigation, text, graphics etc.) or serve as a subtemplate. Since TYPO3 4.3, the new template engine Fluid can be used.

TypoScript

see TypoScript

Extensions

Additional plug-ins to enable additional functions. See Extensions

PHP

As TYPO3 CMS is written in PHP, therefore most features can be modified or extended by experienced users. Mentionable here is the XCLASS mechanism, by which classes and methods can be overwritten and extended. If available, hooks are preferred.

Extensions

Extensions are the cornerstone in the internal architecture of TYPO3. A feature that was introduced with version 3.5 in 2003 is the Extension Manager, a control center managing all TYPO3 extensions. The division between the TYPO3 core and the extensions is an important concept which determined the development of TYPO3 in the past years. Extensions are designed in a way so they can supplement the core seamlessly. This means that a TYPO3 system will appear as a unit while actually being composed of the core application and a set of extensions providing various features.

They can be downloaded from the online repository (TER) directly from the backend, and are installed and updated with a few clicks. Every extension is identified by a unique extension key (for example, tt_news). Also, developers can share new or modified extensions by uploading them to the repository.

Examples for popular extensions:

News (extension key: news): Website news with front page teasers and article handling

RealURL (extension key: realurl): Creates SEO-friendly URLs, "pretty" URLs

PowerMail (extension key: powermail): Powermail is a mailform extension with a lots of features (spam prevention, marketing information, optin, ajax submit, diagram analysis, etc...)

Front End User Registration (extension key: sr_feuser_register): A self-registration system for website users

Direct Mail (extension key: direct_mail): Newsletter mailer system with options for personalized mails and feedback statistics

Grid Elements (extension key: gridelements): Integrates a grid layout concept to enable flexible content output in the frontend, for example for designs based on Bootstrap

Generally, extensions are written in PHP. The full command set of PHP 5.3 can be used (regarded the system requirements of the specific TYPO3 version), but TYPO3 also provides several library classes for better efficiency: Best known and most used is the piBase library class. With introduction of TYPO3 4.3 in 2009, piBase has been replaced (or extended) by the Extbase library, which is a modern, MVC-based development framework. To ensure backwards compatibility, both libraries can be used in the same TYPO3 installation. Extbase itself is a backport of some features of FLOW3, a general web application framework.

Notable projects

As it classifies as an enterprise CMS, many global companies and organisations base their web or intranet sites on TYPO3. The majority is based in german-speaking countries, such as the state of Saxony-Anhalt, the german Green Party, the University of Lucerne (Switzerland), the University of Vienna (Austria) and the Technical University of Berlin. International organisations running one or more TYPO3 sites are: Airbus, Konica-Minolta, Leica Microsystems, Air France, Greenpeace and Meda (Sweden).

Neos

A completely rewritten version (code-named "Phoenix") was originally planned as TYPO3 version 5.0. While working on this new release and analyzing the 10-year history and complexity of TYPO3 v4, the TYPO3 community decided to branch out version 5 as a completely separate product, one that wouldn't replace version 4 in the near future and as such needed to have its own name. Published as FLOW3, it along with various other packages then served as the basis for the start of development of project Phoenix.

In September 2012, the TYPO3 developers decided on the name for the new product, "TYPO3 Neos". With TYPO3 Neos 1.0 alpha1, a public test version was released in late 2012. In May 2015 the TYPO3 Association and the Neos team decided to go separate ways, with TYPO3 CMS remaining the only CMS product endorsed by the Association and the Neos team publishing Neos as a stand-alone CMS without any connection to the TYPO3 world.

In January 2017, Neos 3.0 has been published, along with a new version of Flow framework and a name change of its configuration language from TypoScript2 to Fusion