Introduction ¶

I know many editors and people complaining about TYPO3 for various reasons. In this video I'll show an actual customer project. I demonstrate how performant a website build with TYPO3 and EXT:solr can be. And I demonstrate how pleasant the TYPO3 backend can be.

Context ¶

The customer switched the agency because the old agency created a very slow website. The website used EXT:ke_search. That itself wasn't a problem. The agency extended the search and destroyed the performance. An initial page load of search site, without actually searching, took over 1 minute.

This new website was build by https://werkraum-media.de/ one of our customers. We did the integration and programming part. Our main goal was to use as few dependencies as possible and stick to TYPO3. Still the website should be feature rich.

We decided to integrate EXT:solr as one of the few dependencies. The website has a lot of content and needs a proper search. Furthermore, EXT:solr allows rendering content lists with additional features. I've already published a post back in 2016 regarding this topic, make sure to read it to get the idea.

We also decided to work on editor experience for TYPO3 backend. Editors were overwhelmed by the complexity of the old TYPO3 installation. That installation used EXT:news as many other installations out there. And as very often, EXT:news was extended for events and other kind of contents. The setup was a mess. We decided to use TYPO3 pages instead of EXT:news. Rendering of lists will be done via EXT:solr instead, detail view is done by opening the actual TYPO3 page.

We added different page types as there are still many types from articles over calls for papers and events. Also, the page structure matches the different areas like book reviews, interviews and such things. Editors will find the same structure as visitors that actual matches the types of content.

Video ¶

Acknowledgements ¶

Thanks to the customer https://www.soziopolis.de/ who trusted us and allowed us to build such a great website.

Thanks to our direct customer, the TYPO3 agency https://werkraum-media.de/ for trusting us for many years already. It is always a pleasure to work with them.

Further reading ¶

You might be interested in the following sources:

• Blog post Everything is Content, that can be served via Solr promoting the idea back in 2016

• Blog post TYPO3 Plugins as Content Elements promoting the idea of content elements instead of complicated technical plugins for editors

• TYPO3 extension solr: https://extensions.typo3.org/extension/solr/