Extbase in backend modules

Note

This page is a work in progress. Content will be added as part of the Extbase documentation overhaul.

A backend module gives editors and administrators a place to work with an extension's own data: reviewing submissions, maintaining records that have no frontend form, running reports over the domain model. It is the natural home for everything an extension needs to offer beyond its frontend output.

Extbase supports this directly. The backend establishes its own request and configuration, and Extbase has a dedicated code path for it, so the domain models, repositories and validators an extension already has can be reused in a module without rewriting them against a lower-level API.

The essentials:

Registration is a separate topic and is already documented. See Registering an Extbase backend module.
Configuration comes from module.tx_<extension> rather than plugin.tx_<extension>.
The storagePid is resolved differently than in the frontend. See Resolving the storagePid in a backend module.
Language handling differs as well, and depends on whether the module works with a page tree. See Localization in backend modules.