TYPO3 is a free and open source web content management framework based on PHP. It is released under the GNU General Public License. It can run on several web servers, such as Apache or IIS, on top of many operating systems, among them Linux, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, Mac OS X and OS/2.

Features

Delivered with a base set of interfaces, functions and modules, TYPO3's huge functionality spectrum is implemented by extensions.

A web based backend is used by authors and site administrators to manage content for the web site.

TYPO3 can run on most HTTP servers such as Apache or IIS on top of Linux, Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X. It uses PHP 5.3 or newer and any relational database supported by the TYPO3 DBAL including MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and others. Some 3rd-party extensions - not using the database API - support MySQL as the only database engine. The system can be run on any web server with a modern CPU and at least 256 MB RAM. The Backend can be displayed in any modern browser with JavaScript. There is no browser restriction for displaying user-oriented content generated by TYPO3.

Design

Conceptually, TYPO3 consists of two parts: the visitor-visible Frontend and the administrative Backend. The Frontend displays the web content. The Backend is responsible for administration and manipulating content.

TYPO3 defines various basic types of content data. Standard types include: text, image, text with image, HTML, table, video, lists, etc. These types can be extended through plugins. The most fundamental type is "page". Every element that can appear to the user belongs to a certain page. Pages are hierarchical. There are special page types; such as shortcuts (that show content from another page), mount points (that insert a part of the page tree at the mount point), external URL, and more.

The system uses a special configuration language called "TypoScript" to instruct the system to fetch data from the database, process this data and generate web content. Usually TypoScript is used in conjunction with one of the available template engines, such as "automaketemplate" or "TemplaVoila", to create output based on one or more HTML templates.

TYPO3 is almost completely pluggable and extensible. For example, TYPO3 can use several user authentication methods (such as RSA shared keys or OpenID) by installing extensions to the main system.