I know there are a lot of Typo3 tutorials sites out there but as I am really just learning Typo3 I thought it would be useful for myself and others to have a reference as to what I have found really useful out of all the material out there. When you are not a developer and are not already extremely familiar with the CMS then it gives you a fresh perspective.

Those who have been working with Typo3 for a long time will no doubt have forgotten what a nightmare it is to start using, and thus will often gloss over things that have become second nature to them but are not at all obvious to the novice. I aim to highlight those things and document my struggles and triumphs- as with all things computer-related there will certainly be plenty of those.

I am pretty familiar with Wordpress but my limited experience with T3 has shown me that it is possibly a lot more powerful and certainly a lot more complicated and difficult to get one’s head around than that excellent blogging/CMS software. As you will notice I am using WP to do this site, if I get familiar enough with T3 to switch the site over to that then you will know I am winning the battle! If the site goes down for long periods you will know I am losing it. But! I am not easily discouraged, so let’s get on with it and if you want to contribute please feel free to leave a comment or three.

I tried to follow the tutorial exactly but it is for a previous version of T3 so when he says to install the ‘Modern Template Building’ extension, it didn’t appear as an available package, so I had to go to the http://typo3-tutorial.arciris.com/?p=18 Ok, I worked out what I had to do to get the Quickstart site going!

Also I found out that there is a readymade installation of T3 in the ubuntu repositories, although it is apparently a bit out of date. Might be worth a go if you don’t mind that and want to save yourself the trouble of installing it (of course you’d still have to create the database etc).

So I think I can safely say that the installation of Typo3 is now finished.

You can try the dh_base extension, it’s not working out of the box, but
it gives you a starting base to setup your site.

go to the extensions manager under Admin tools,

In the settings, check the “Enable extensions without review”
The settings is found in the dropdown box at the top of the Extension Manager page

run the “retrieve/update”

Use the dropdown again to get to ‘Import Extensions’

import “dh_base”

It downloads all extensions needed, all you have to do is import them in
the backend.

After the installation, you get a new menu entry under WEB. (only if you
have no pages in your database, worst case drop the pages content)

set the values needed

Map the elements in templavoilà.

With that way you have a running instance with some already written
typoscript code.
I know the extension needs clean up, sorry for that.

Hope it helps.
Daniel

Well, whaddya know, there is no extension called dh_base, and this guy seems to be the only one who mentions it on the whole internet apart from one page in French. This seems to be fairly typical of the Typo3 world, but I will find a way around it somehow.

tar xzpf quickstart-3.8.1.tar.gz

Then I renamed the resulting folder to quickstart and added it as a virtual host on my system, and also put it in /etc/hosts. I changed the permissions as detailed for the Dummy site in Part One of this tutorial and then tried to access it with Firefox by going to http://quickstart - it gave a 403 Forbidden error so I double-checked the permissions but they seemed fine.

I had the idea to check the structure of the Dummy site and compare it then I realised where I was going wrong. The symlink to the typo3_src package was broken and there were also broken symlinks to other files and folders such as media and index php. I basically changed the index.php symlink so that it matched that in the Dummy site:

index.php -> typo3_src/index.php

and deleted the other broken symlinks (these should normally be highlighted in your shell console, not sure if Putty does that but I imagine it would.)

Then I went to http://quickstart and tried again and this time the install tool flashed up for a second, so I created the ENABLE_INSTALL_TOOL file in the typo3conf folder and this time I got the proper install tool.

I went through the install routine as in part one and then logged into the frontend, but got several error messages, the first of which was:

typo3 is not a valid MySQL result resource in /var/www/typo3_src-4.2.1/t3lib/class.t3lib_db.php

So there’s some problem with the database… I will try and debug that in part 3.

Kubuntu 8.10 Hardy Heron

Apache2 webserver with:

PHP 5.2.4-2ubuntu5.2 with Suhosin-Patch 0.9.6.2 (cli) (built: Jul  3 2008 16:46:01)

(this is according to the command php -v)

mysql  Ver 14.12 Distrib 5.0.51a, for debian-linux-gnu (i486) using readline 5.2

(according to mysql –version)

Now, I have heard that Typo3 will only run on php4 but on other pages it says it will run on php5 so Im going to try to install it on php5 and see how far I get. And if that is not very far I will then install php4.

So, I worked out that in order to install Typo3 you can’t just dl one package like with Wordpress, you have to get two- the source package and the ‘dummy’ package which is a kind of template site.

I picked the latest version from the Source Forge page which at the time of writing is 4.2.1 and downloaded both packages.

The tar.gz files have to be copied into the root of the webserver, which in my case is the folder /var/www/ (I believe other distros vary here, and if you’re using LAMPP then it will be /opt/lampp/htdocs)

Might be an idea to make yourself root here with ’sudo su’ so you don’t have to keep typing ’sudo’. Then you have to untar them with the command:

tar xzpvf typo3_src-x.x.x.tar.gz
tar xzpvf dummy-x.x.x.tar.gz


-obviously replacing the ‘x’s with the version number.

It might be an idea to change permissions/ownership on both folders to the webserver:
chown -R www-data:www-data typo3_src-x.x.x
chown -R www-data:www-data dummy-x.x.x

The ‘dummy’ package is going to be the website itself so that can be renamed - I did it like this:
mv dummy-4.2.1 local.typo3.com

Then I set up my virtual host for local.typo3.com and also added it to /etc/hosts (how to do that stuff is outside the scope of this tutorial so Google it or look on the Ubuntu forums if you’re struggling).

Next I went into the directory that used to be dummy and is now local.typo3.com and changed the permissions as instructed in the README:

chmod -R g+w,o-rwx fileadmin typo3conf typo3temp uploads

In the README it said ‘Check the symlink cms/typo3_src and make sure it points to the source
directory.’ - in my case it would be local.typo3.com/typo3_src as I didn’t follow their suggestion of renaming the dummy directory to cms. So I did a ‘ls -la’ and it appeared to be pointing to the right directory which is ‘../typo3_src-4.2.1′.

Now in Firefox I went to local.typo3.com and the Install tool flashed up for a second but then told me I had to create the file ENABLE_INSTALL_TOOL. I went into the typo3conf directory and did:
touch ENABLE_INSTALL_TOOL

Next I went back to the browser and now it allowed me to proceed with the install which, providing you’ve made a MySQL database and user for it already, is very easy. And you can’t say that too many times about T3 I don’t reckon.

I went through the main part of the install and when it finished I went on to check the server parameters as they suggest and to my surprise it all looked all right- I couldn’t see all the text in the ‘FreeType quick-test’ but that was solved by changing the resolution to 96 in the ‘[GFX][TTFdpi]=’ box at the bottom of that page.

So I think I’ve got it set up and on that happy note I will leave it there. For now.

YouTube - TYPO3 ‘out-of-the-box’.