Introduction to the TYPO3 Onboarding Curriculum

Background

This curriculum is created by the TYPO3 Community Expansion Committee as a starting point for our knowledge transfer and onboarding projects, such in Rwanda. We are developing it iteratively, with the goal that it will become a resource for …

  1. TYPO3 experts teaching TYPO3 to IT professionals
  2. IT professionals being taught by TYPO3 experts
  3. IT professionals learning TYPO3 on their own

Intended audience

Teacher profile

A person teaching using this curriculum should have extensive experience with the technologies they teach. Flexibility and practical know-how from different systems is beneficial. Lack of certifications, such as the TYPO3 consultant, developer, and integrator certifications, can be offset by documented experience from relevant technologies and projects.

At the current stage, we consider TYPO3 experts teaching based on this curriculum as contributors to the curriculum by adding their teaching materials and improvements to this curriculum.

Student profile

A student following this curriculum will need time available to take part in every lesson. The student must fulfill the theoretical and practical prerequisites outlined for Stage 1.

Overview

Time

The curriculum describes 175 lessons over 35 days, split into 5 week-long stages.

Each stage should ideally be separated by 2–5 weeks, where the student has time to get further acquainted with TYPO3 through individual work and tasks assigned by the teacher (according to agreement and need).

Goal and progression

This curriculum intends to give a comprehensive overview of TYPO3 and the technologies necessary to implement and maintain TYPO3-based websites in an enterprise environment, such as a large corporation or government. This includes theoretical and practical experience with local development, multitenant (multisite) and multilingual scenarios, continuous deployment and continuous integration workflows, and security best-practices.

On the other hand, it is not intended to give the students complete knowledge of TYPO3 or related technologies. The goal is rather to give them the necessary knowledge to operate independently and find help where necessary, such as from TYPO3's documentation and community.

This is a middle ground between the prepared instructions of a tutorial and a complete mastery. Some examples:

  • The introduction to command-line tools will go beyond basic copying and pasting of completed commands, introducing students to the options and arguments needed for practical exercises, and how to adapt them. However, it will not teach every way to use a command, but instead where to find and use the documentation of other commands.
  • TYPO3 will be taught with specific goals in mind, such as configuring a website. This will not give a complete overview of TYPO3's features or guarantee immediate success at a TYPO3 certification exam, but the curriculum will give the students an overview of where to discover and read more. It will also encourage independent exploration of the content management system and related technologies.
  • Though the curriculum teaches the students to recognize common potential security issues, implement their systems securely, and work in accordance with recognized security best practices, it will not create security experts or guarantee secure results. It will therefore also emphasize the need for continuous security vigilance and give examples of where to locate up-to-date security updated and advice.