Flexible Content Elements¶

What does it do?¶

Provides a fully flexible content element support for TYPO3. Allows to create a custom content type which can be easily used to display news, workshops, events, teams or whatever you want.

Features for administrators

• Custom content types without writing one line of code.
• Restrict access to the newly created content types using default TYPO3 features.
• Creates own database tables for each content-type which allows to create simple statistics or backups.

Features for developers

• Based on Extbase and Fluid
• Access custom content types from your Extbase extensions with simple- to-use repositories
• Create Fluid templates to display your content types in the front end.
• Can also be accessed with pibase extensions using t3lib_db

Features for editors

• Simple to use
• Fully integrates with TYPO3. Editors do not need to learn new ways of editing content

What are flexible content types?¶

A content element is simply a content-type you can add using the “List” module to a page or SysFolder. This extension provides flexible content elements, which mean, that you can define fully custom content types without writing one line of code. Examples for custom content types could be:

• News, having a subject, a text and a category
• Team members, having a name, a description, gender and a photo
• Guestbook entry, having a name, email address, homepage, text and an icon
• Article for a café, having a name, a description, a photo and a price
• Link to another page
• and whatever you want

Screenshots¶

Image 1: List of content element configurations

Image 2: New record creation for configured content types

Image 3: Create new “Team member” record

Image 4: Plugin used to display any flexible content type

Sponsoring & Bugfixing¶

This version of “flexible content elements” is still in development. For this reason this extension still might have some bugs and many of missing features. If you found a bug or a missing feature, please share it on http://forge.typo3.org .

Help, especially including patches, is of course always welcome!

Further help¶

Further help can be found in the wiki of the project on http://forge.typo3.org

I will try to post tutorials and examples very soon. You're also welcome to share something in the wiki. Simply add it to the issue tracker or send it per e-mail to me.

Installation¶

The extension needs to be installed as any other extension of TYPO3.

Simply download the extension from the TER and install it using the Extension Manager.

Please don't forget to add the static template to the template if you're going to use the frontend plugin!

Create custom content-types¶

Only administrators are allowed to create custom content-types. Read more about it in the “administration” section of this manual.

Create a record of a custom content-types¶

Custom content types can be simply created using the default “List” module of TYPO3. If you're allowed to create content types, you can select the SysFolder (or page, if the content type is allowed for pages) you want to create the record to and click on “Create new record”. Select the content type and fill the record form as you are used to by the default TYPO3 content types.

Display records in the frontend¶

To list content records on any page, you can use the plugin with comes with this extension. The plugin configuration in separated in three parts:

• Input : Defines which records should be displayed
• Process : Configures the way the records should be displayed
• Output : Defines the Fluid template used for rendering

Create custom content types¶

As administrator you are allowed to create or modify content types. Please be careful when modifying existing content types. You should always create a database backup before.

To create a custom content type, go to the “List” module and select the root-page. Create a new “Content element type” record.

Create templates for the plugin¶

To learn about how to create templates for the plugin take a look at the Fluid manual. You can access the record fields using the “field name” of the field.

Access flexbile content elements from Extbase¶

You can access models and repositories of your flexible content elements from any extbase extension you create. You can access them using the class names:

Tx_BsFce_Domain_Model_Content_ UpperCamelCasedTableName

Tx_BsFce_Domain_Repository_Content_ UpperCamelCasedTableName Repository