Patrick's TYPO3 Story : Part Deux

What we installed, how we worked and few extensions that were kind to us...

Part 1 is part Un.

So I’m on a tight schedule to deliver a working TYPO3 installation to my Edimaster…

Hopefully, Ingmar (if I recall) made available a Windows installer that installed TYPO3 3.5, Apache 1.3, MySQL 3.23, PHP 4 and ImageMagick 4.2.9. It even used the Getting Started site that was later shown on Kasper’s video.

It worked like a charm and it was enough to be able to test everything from the Getting Started manual and show the system to few key people. My instinct was on the right track after all.

The following weeks I present my discoveries to the other guy that was part of the IT team and we work on different aspects of the system, reading docs and trying to figure it out… He was mainly learning TypoScript and templating (that was before TemplaVoilà) and I learned the remaining technical stuff.

The work was dividied into these:

IT (TYPO3 and server).
Design and menus.
Architecture and content.

Our needs where not that advanced and we used these extensions: Automake_Template (see Modern Template building tutorial) PHP_content (not available anymore because it’s seen as a security risk)

Custom Tags Ahh Custom Tags (CT)…

I think I will have to write a whole entry on that one.

In short, it was possible with CT to easily incorporate some tags we decide and call an external database to get some content. That was a lifesaver. There’s also a second side to CT with the possibility to create some kind of glossary. Supposed you create an entry like “ctt3guru” and associate this html code “Kasper Skårhøj » will be rendered in the FE. Just insure you don’t use any real word, it’s why we always add « ct » (like in Custom Tag) first.

So we had all the pieces and each team went his way (TYPO3, graphics and content).

I’ve already warned everybody that for the next 2 months they wouldn’t see anything from those working on the CSM. I’m glad I did since it relieves us from some pressure while learning TYPO3. I have to remind you that while exploring that new CMS territory, we had lots of other web systems to work on so it didn’t took 2 months full time to do everything!

One of the funny thing is that while digging into TYPO3, I got the information that the CÉGEP de Sainte-Foy (some kind of High School in Québec) where working on TYPO3! I contacted the webmaster there (in fact it was a webmistress named Annie Raymond that would latter be present at every TYPO3 Québec meeting). We exchange tips and tricks and that was a very good win-win situation.

It’s about that time that I wrote to Kasper that the newbies where left alone in the TYPO3 maze and from those mail exchanges the « New to TYPO3 » page saw the light…

Let’s go to Part Trois where I talk about my Custom Tag story!

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