Introduction for developers

Target group: Developers, Integrators

Introduction

The structured markup can be generated in two ways:

Each type in the schema.org vocabulary corresponds to a PHP model that provides the available properties. There is also a view helper for each type that makes it easy to integrate the data into your website via a Fluid template.

Attention should be paid to the following points:

  • A web page can be characterised by different schema.org types as outlined in this chapter. The WebPage type is set automatically if the corresponding configuration option is set. But it can always overridden manually with the desired type and properties. The chapter The WebPage type is dedicated to this topic.
  • A breadcrumb does not only help the user to recognise the location of a particular page on the website. It is also helpful for search engines to understand the structure of your website. Google honors the website operator for using the breadcrumb schema markup on a page: It will be shown in the search result snippet.
  • The main entity of a web page indicates the primary entity. It can be set separately from a WebPage.

Note

Please keep in mind: If the seo system extension is installed and the checkbox no_index on a page is activated, no schema markup is shown at all on that page. This makes no sense as the page is ignored by search engines and so the markup is also ignored.

But: If you like to add markup to non-indexed pages, you can use a slot/PSR-14 event.

Quick dive-in

The schema.org vocabulary consists of many types, like Person, Organization, Product, and so on. They are written with an upper letter at the beginning of the term.

Each type has several properties which characterise the specific type, like givenName or lastName for a Person. The properties start with a lower letter at the beginning in the vocabulary.

The most generic type is Thing. Each other type inherits the properties from one or more other types, e.g: Corporation is a specific type for Organization and defines a new property. Organization itself is a specific type of Thing and inherits the properties of Thing and defines many more properties characterising this type.

You can retrieve the information about a type or property from the URL https://schema.org/ followed by the term name. (e.g. https://schema.org/Person) or the name of the property (e.g. https://schema.org/givenName).

Models

This extension provides model classes for each type under the PHP namespace \Brotkrueml\Schema\Model\Type. For example, the type Thing is mapped to the model \Brotkrueml\Schema\Model\Type\Thing, which knows about the according schema.org properties. A property value can be set with an according method:

$thing = \Brotkrueml\Schema\Type\TypeFactory::createType('Thing');
$thing->setProperty('name', 'A thing');

The schema manager connects the type models to the page and is responsible for generating the markup on the web page:

$schemaManager = TYPO3\CMS\Core\Utility\GeneralUtility::makeInstance(
   \Brotkrueml\Schema\Manager\SchemaManager::class
);
$schemaManager->addType($thing);

The chapter Using The API describes in-depth how to use the models and the schema manager.

Note

The models were generated from the schema.org definition and will be updated as the standard evolves.

View helpers

For usage in Fluid templates, each type is mapped to a view helper in the schema:type namespace. You assign the type properties as view helper arguments, e.g.:

<schema:type.thing name="A thing"/>

The view helpers can be nested into each other.

The chapter Using the view helpers explains the usage of the view helpers in detail.

Note

The view helpers were generated from the schema.org definition and will be updated as the standard evolves.