Attention
TYPO3 v8 has reached its end-of-life March 31st, 2020 and is not maintained by the community anymore. Looking for a stable version? Use the version switch on the top left.
There is no further ELTS support. It is recommended that you upgrade your project and use a supported version of TYPO3.
Introduction¶
Overview¶
For most people TYPO3 is equivalent to a CMS providing a backend for management of the content and a frontend engine for website display. However TYPO3s core is natively designed to be a general purpose framework for management of database content. The core of TYPO3 CMS delivers a set of principles for storage of this content, user access management, editing of the content, uploading and managing files etc. Many of these principles are expressed as an API (Application Programming Interface) for use in extensions which ultimately add most of the real functionality.
So the core is the skeleton and extensions are the muscles, fibers and skin making a full bodied CMS. In this document I cut to the bone and provide a detailed look at the core of TYPO3 CMS including the API available to the outside. This is supposed to be the final technical reference apart from source code itself which is - of course - the ultimate documentation.
This manual is a complement to Core APIs.
Intended audience¶
This document is intended to be a reference for experienced TYPO3 CMS developers. For intermediates it will help you to become experienced! But the document presumes that you are well familiar with TYPO3 and the concepts herein. Further it will presume knowledge in the technical end; PHP, MySQL, Unix etc.
The goal is to take you "under the hood" of TYPO3 CMS. To make the principles and opportunities clear and less mysterious. To educate you to help continue the development of TYPO3 along the already established lines so we will have a consistent CMS application in a future as well. And hopefully my teaching on the deep technical level will enable you to educate others higher up in the "hierarchy". Please consider that as well!
What's new¶
This version has been fully updated for TYPO3 CMS 7. This manual had not been updated in a very long time, which means it is impossible to list all changes. Let's just consider it a clean slate for now.
How to contribute¶
If you find a bug in this manual, please be so kind as to check the online version on http://docs.typo3.org/typo3cms/InsideTypo3Reference/. From there you can hit the "Edit me on GitHub" button in the top right corner and submit a pull request via GitHub. Alternatively you can just file an issue using the bug tracker.
Maintaining high quality documentation requires time and effort and the TYPO3 Documentation Team always appreciates support. If you want to support us, please join the slack channel typo3-documentation. Visit https://forger.typo3.org/slack to gain access to Slack. Have a look at the contribution page for more information: https://docs.typo3.org/Contribute/Index.html And finally, as a last resort, you can get in touch with the documentation team by mail.
Credits¶
This manual was originally written by Kasper Skårhøj. It was further maintained, refreshed and expanded by François Suter.