It's a blogging-extension – so you can expect this extension to do the work as a normal blog does. You can create posts, you can categorize your posts, user can comment posts and much more. The feature section gives you a nice overview of the capabilities of this TYPO3 blog.

The power of this extension is not mainly its richness of functionalities – please immediately switch to WordPress or another blog-only system if you  need every little blogging gadget! The great use of this extension is its seamless integration into TYPO3 and its easiness in installing it. And due to the seamless integration into this powerful CMS you have all the cool features you ever dreamt of.

In the past we had several times the opportunity to integrate TIMTAB into TYPO3 which was sometimes pretty easy, sometimes (too) hard work. Too many dependencies between all the involved extensions sometimes made it quite complex to customize single extensions to the customer needs. Not speaking of all the different lifecycles of the involved extensions. Some are updated every other week, some are not compatible with a specific TYPO3 version and others are still in alpha state.

Therefore we (= the snowflake developer team) decided during Christmas  2007 to develop in a loosely teamwork this blog extension. The first steps were taken very fast – but after a few weeks daily business  took over and only little time could be invested to improve the blog. If there wouldn't have been such a big echo when we were  first presenting the idea of such a blog the project would have died in spring. So thanks to all of you asking us every other day when the blog would be available. This showed us that  there is a real need to have such a TYPO3 blog.

Voilà! Here it is! Enjoy it.

The blog uses TYPO3 as  framework for input and outputs – so you'll need at least a running TYPO3 4.1 installation to start blogging without hassle. We suggest to use 4.2 for the best user experience, but this extension might run  on all other 4.x versions as well. But we never really tested it heavily on 4.1.

Beside of this you will need the DAM installed (extension key dam) and we suggest to use the extension RealURL (extension key realurl) for the nice human readable URLs.

We use our own handy typoscript tools (extension key typoscripttools) for a better handling of configurations and outputs (like the DAM). You also can download this from the TER, but it is not documented – just use it.

Beside of this we also use a antispam-function (sfpantispam) to block all this crappy spam. To use this, read the readme.txt section of the sfpantispam extension.

It's recommended that you have installed Mootools (1.*) in your frontend. Some widgets use the mootools features. If your website does not support Mootools, you can also find the mootools script in this extension.

There are much more features included in this blog which other blog systems would promote as really cool gimmicks. But since this blog is already based on a very cool CMS there is no need to mention all the other great features you have when blogging with TYPO3. Anyway if you would like to have some kind of additional feature list, please refer to http://www.typo3.com/Feature_list.1243.0.html where you will find a tremendous amount of features.

Yes, we would like to share your experience when you first implement this blog. Please refer to this website http://blog.snowflake.ch and look for the corresponding entries and comments. On this blog you have the possibility to send us your frustration, thank us, or just to read what is planned in the next release. But this is not the right place to get support! Please send all your questions to the "English" TYPO3 mailing list. Many very experienced TYPO3 users will help you with installing, debugging or customizing. And in case of bugs please refer to the TYPO3 bugtracker which can be found on http://bugs.typo3.org/

Please do not send support requests to the authors of this extension. If you would like to have (commercial) support, feel free to get in touch with snowflake productions gmbh, Dominic Brander, dbrander@snowflake.ch.

Thanks for sticking to the rules!

The blog has not been tested on older TYPO3 systems like 3.8 or even older. So please do not expect this blog to work with versions older than TYPO3 4.1.

Since this blog does not extend other extensions or is heavily relied on extensions other than the DAM, we do not expect to have compatibility problems.

If you are using mootools AND prototypes in your installation you will run into trouble since both JavaScript frameworks use the same namespace. So you will have to decide for one of these. We decided for mootools.

For the backend we used the skin “Improved t3skin” (extension key t3skin_improved). So the shown might differ dependent on the installed skin. But the following screens might give you a rough overview of the look&feel.

Backend: Posts

Backend Comments

Backend: Categories

Backend: Blogroll

Frontend: List

Frontend: Single View

Frontend: Comments

Yes, this blog is already in use on different websites. So you can be sure you do not get an untested piece of software. At least the features we are using seem to be stable.

Have a look at this already implemented blogs to get a better picture of what you can do with it: