Typo3

TYPO3 is a free and open source content management system. It is written with PHP. It has become one of the leading content management systems (CMS) on the web and in intranets.

Author and availability

Initially authored by Kasper Skårhøj, it is available for free and licensed under the GNU General Public License. Today, the core of TYPO3 is developed by two teams in a maintenance tree (4.x, leader Michael Stucki) and a development tree (5.x, leader Robert Lemke). Independent authors have contributed hundreds of pluggable extensions.

TYPO3 offers full flexibility and extendability while featuring an accomplished set of ready-made interfaces, functions and modules. Nearly 2000 extensions are available for download under the GNU General Public License from a repository called the TYPO3 Extension Repository, or TER.

Operating modes

TYPO3 has two operating modes: a frontend, which presents a TYPO3 based website to its users, and a backend, used by authors and site administrators to manage content for the website. The backend is used with an ordinary web browser, so there is no special software needed to work on a TYPO3-based website.

Design

The system is based on templates. People can choose an existing template and change features such as logo, colors, and fonts, or they can construct their own templates using a configuration language called TypoScript. In this simple notation, a large object tree structure of information is created with placeholders for data from the database to fill in. Preprogrammed objects are configured by changing or adding values or features. This object tree structure is saved in a text file. Various editors are available to change the content in a structured way. The PHP generator uses this data structure to drive the generation of the content. Besides conditions, TypoScript has no other control structures; if real processing must be performed, it is handed to a PHP function. The top level object is the PAGE object. There are various types of MENU objects.

References

1. Wikipedia - TYPO3

Related links

1. TYPO3 official page