A Crash Course in Typoscript

The purpose of this talk will be to provide the audience with a 45 minute crash course in Typoscript. The talk will be aimed at TYPO3 administrators and developers who find Typoscript frustrating, confusing, or downright maddening. I will start by explaining the fundamentals of TypoScript, including what it is, its syntax, and how it generally functions throughout the TYPO3 core. I will give a brief overview of available Typoscript resources on typo3.org and a quick lesson in how to read the TSREF, which can be a challenge in and of itself. Building off of this foundation, the talk will move quickly into more advanced Typoscript techniques and best practices. We’ll walk through of some of the more vexing components of Typoscript, including the ways in which Typoscript can interact with the page record (or, in some cases, the cObject data property), CASE objects, and more advanced parts of stdWrap. We’ll look at how, in the end, everything in TYPO3 gets rendered through Typoscript, including plugins. We’ll discuss strategies for extending the Typoscript that renders core content elements in CSS Styled Content. Everyone will leave the talk with a Typoscript cheat sheet, and better understanding of how to utilize Typoscript effectively in their TYPO3 projects and how to find solutions when Typoscript doesn’t do what they expect it to.