Getting Help With TYPO3

By: Michael Cannon

Submitting your vote...

Rating: 5.0 of 5. 3 vote(s).
Click the rating bar to rate this item.

There's a rumor that TYPO3 has a steep learning curve. As with most rumors, there's a grain of truth in it.

When I first started with TYPO3 back in early 2002 for the BIZNewOrleans.com news portal, sadly shut down due to Hurricane Katrina, TYPO3 really did take quite a bit of work to make things happen.

Then... 6 months for BIZNewOrleans.com

The BIZ New Orleans project took about 6 months with a project manager, client representative, 2 developers, and a graphics designer. The time taken was due to the lack of readily available documentation and resources. Additionally, the TYPO3 core and its 75 extensions had flexibility issues which lead to software rewrites.

In the end though, the BIZ New Orleans system readily let many reporters post news straight to the BIZ New Orleans website during an event and immediately after an interview. Furthermore, with news being broken into multiple categories with lists, archives, and search; targeted advertising was readily applied. On top of this, the newsletter system was setup such that the newsletter was automatically created everyday and an administrator only had to hit the "send" button to push it to 6,000 plus recipients.

Now... A month, with even more features

To build a similar system these days doesn't require 6 months anymore. Actually, with a competent TYPO3 developer or two and a clean code writing designer, a similar website is live within a month.

What's made the time and resource difference? Community exposure, documentation, enterprise awareness, experience, mailing lists, time, and training.

TYPO3 has several thousands of pages of published and online documentation such as the TYPO3 Book, TYPO3 wiki, extension manuals, and T3N Magazine.

Taking a cue from the TYPO3 Document Library, here's some links to help get you moving forward a bit faster with TYPO3.

TYPO3 Professionals Reading List

• Installation
  • Installation and Upgrade
  • Getting Started (Wiki)
• Getting Started
  
  • Getting Started
  • TYPO3 Beginners
  • Your First Steps with TYPO3
• Templating
  • Futuristic Template Building (templavoila)
  • Modern Template Building (automktemplate)
• TypoScript
  • TypoScript Reference (TSref)
  • TypoScript Syntax and In-depth Study
  • TypoScript By Example
• TYPO3 Framework
  • Inside TYPO3
  • TSConfig
  • TypoScript Syntax and In-depth Study
  • Frontend Localization Guide
• Extensions
  • Extension Manuals
• Developers
  
  • Developer Help
  • Golden Rules for TYPO3 extension programmers
  • TYPO3 Coding Guidelines
  • TYPO3 Core API

Reading and knowing doesn't replace hard earned experience. So when the time comes you need additional help, we at Acqal are ready to assist you via our website support agreement. The website support agreement makes us your on-call TYPO3 support agency with 1-business day responses.