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.

Templates

After that brief overview of pages and content elements, you might wonder how all this structure is turned into a web site, complete with page layout, CSS and JavaScript files.

In TYPO3 CMS this job is achieved using templates which should be considered as a kind of configuration written in a language called TypoScript.

The WEB > Template module provides an overview of the TypoScript configuration and allows to work with so-called "template records", which is where the TypoScript configuration is actually stored.

Here is a brief view of the Template module:

The Template module showing the hierarchy of TypoScript templates

Templating itself is covered by other tutorials:

  • the TypoScript in 45 minutes Tutorial covers the basics of TypoScript and how to relate pages and content elements to an actual HTML output.

  • the Templating Tutorial guides you through the actual integration of HTML models into your TYPO3 CMS installation using TypoScript.

Facts About Templates and Possibilities

Here is a short list of the possibilities offered by TYPO3 CMS templates:

  • You can implement any design you like, the way you like.

  • You can have any number of menu levels.

  • You can have multiple sites, multiple templates.

  • You can have pages in any number of languages.

  • You can have multiple content areas (columns) on a page.

  • You can integrate all kinds of external data sources through plugins written in PHP.

  • You can add any number of web applications to run on various pages in TYPO3.

  • You can extend pretty much anything with PHP.