A year has passed since I began my current role as wild website wrangler and royal div scoocher for the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. In that time, I’ve had to learn a lot of tools that were brand new to me, the main one being TYPO3 - an open source CMS that’s very popular across German academic institutions.
As the sole web developer on my team with no other TYPO3 specialists in the building, I relied heavily on digital mentorship to get myself trained up. Like any self-respecting dev that’s been handed an unfamiliar tool, I began my learning process by reading through the official TYPO3 documentation.
Within about two weeks, two things became abundantly clear:
- I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, and
- the TYPO3 docs were not going to cut it.
When the docs ain’t doc-ing
Echoing the pained cries of many a frustrated dev before me, the TYPO3 docs are far from comprehensive or approachable. They leave much to be desired, (in fact they leave a number of things out entirely,) particularly for older TYPO3 versions like v10 and v11, which I needed to learn for my job.
The first thing that jumped out at me is that the TYPO3 docs are not beginner-friendly. They assume a fair amount of background knowledge while failing to provide references to external resources that might help beginners build the needed foundation. After being positively spoiled by the amazingly complete, hand-holding documentation like that of Astro, the paltry TYPO3 docs seemed hostile in comparison.
Secondly, these docs didn’t suit my learning style. I prefer cookbook-style docs where mini-projects are used to build out step-by-step tutorials without requiring a complete grasp of every last conceptual detail. The TYPO3 docs are sorely lacking in this flavor of documentation and read more like an encyclopedia that assumes you know what you’re looking for.
Thirdly, the TYPO3 docs are patchier than a beard on a naked mole rat. Their organization is piecemeal and unintuitive, and the platform-specific terminology is confusing as hell1. Many topics are scattered across disparate reference collections, making it difficult to know where to start or how the pieces connect to one another. Cranking up the chaos knob to 11, the docs are brimming with definitional muddling which makes finding and parsing information a labrynthian slog.
Cooking up TYPO3 Recipes
Leaning into my archivist tendencies instead of caving to overwhelm, I took diligent notes on every TYPO3 project I tackled, big and small. I started building a library of my own TYPO3 how-to guides cobbled together from the official docs, Stack Overflow, archived forum posts, developer blogs, ChatGPT-assisted rubber ducking, and grueling hours of trial and error.
My initial intention in making these guides was to make life easier for myself on subsequent projects, but I’ve since decided to polish and publish them here in a new blog series I’m calling TYPO3 Recipes. These are the guides I wish I had as I stumbled up the TYPO3 learning cliff.
If one of these recipes helps even one person on the verge of gouging their eyes out with a stale cheeto at the next insulting “Oops, an error occurred” message, I’ll pat myself on the back with a fresh bag of cheetos.
Footnotes
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The TYPO3 community is aware they have a terminology problem and my frustration was partially soothed upon seeing that even the seasoned pros are confused by each other’s TYPO3 jargon: https://talk.typo3.org/t/clarification-of-term-typoscript/5474/7 ↩