For most people TYPO3 is equivalent to a CMS providing a backend for management of the content and a frontend engine for website display. However TYPO3s core is natively designed to be a general purpose framework for management of database content. The core of TYPO3 delivers a set of principles for storage of this content, user access management, editing of the content, uploading and managing files etc. Many of these principles are expressed as an API (Application Programmers Interface) for use in the extensions which ultimately adds most of the real functionality.
So the core is the skeleton and extensions are the muscles, fibers and skin making a full bodied CMS. In this document I cut to the bone and provide a detailed look at the core of TYPO3 including the API available to the outside. This is supposed to be the final technical reference apart from source code itself which is - of course - the ultimate documentation.
This document is intended to be a reference for experienced TYPO3 developers. For intermediates it will help you to become experienced! But the document presumes that you are well familiar with TYPO3 and the concepts herein. Further it will presume knowledge in the technical end; PHP, MySQL, Unix etc.
The goal is to take you "under the hood" of TYPO3. To make the principles and opportunities clear and less mysterious. To educate you to help continue the development of TYPO3 along the already established lines so we will have a consistent CMS application in a future as well. And hopefully my teaching on the deep technical level will enable you to educate others higher up in the "hierarchy". Please consider that as well!
We are committed to keeping this document up-to-date. We also want this document and related documents to contain enough information for you to develop with TYPO3 effectively. But guess what - in any case the source is updated before this document is and therefore the ultimate source of both up-to-date information and more information is peeking into the source scripts! And for the source scripts we are also trying to keep them well documented.
So generally the source code is the final authority, the final place to look for features and get a precise picture of function arguments etc. The documentation inside the source scripts will be short and precise, no examples, not much explanation. But enough for people knowing what to look for. This document - an other documents like "TYPO3 Core API" - should provide the greater picture explanations for use.
If you find that sections in this document are missing something, please help the author by notifying him and possibly supply a piece of text which could serve as the supplement you want to have added. You can also use the annotation feature in the online version at TYPO3.org.
Notice: TYPO3 version 4 bears a new visual interface (skin) that is not reflected in the screenshots of this document. However, this does not have any impact on the content itself.
