Preface

TYPO3 is one of the world's leading open source content management systems, written in PHP, which can be used to create and customize your website. Along with text content, you can display high quality images, audio, and video to your site's visitors by using TYPO3. It is essential to manage various types of multimedia files in content management systems for both editors and the users on the frontend of the site.

This book gives you the step-by-step process for organizing an effective multimedia system. It also gives solutions to commonly encountered problems, and offers a variety of tools for dealing with multimedia content. The author's experience in large-scale systems enables him to share his effective solutions to these problems.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started introduces the reader to TYPO3, and helps set up a basic website; where the material in this chapter alone is not enough, the user is directed to other resources to fill in the gaps of knowledge in order to proceed further.

Chapter 2, Managing Digital Assets introduces the reader to the concept of digital asset management. Accounts for various groups of users (editors, administrators, web users) are created and assigned permissions. We also create a first extension that allows web users to upload files into the system.

Chapter 3, Operating with Metadata in Media Files expands upon the digital asset management idea, and cover file metadata, which can be used to classify files. The chapter covers various types and formats of metadata, and how it can be extracted in TYPO3.

Chapter 4, Rendering Images covers how images can be included on a TYPO3-driven website using content elements and a TYPO3 script. It also covers how to embed images in Rich Text Editor. You will learn to render links to media files, create a gallery, and render metadata using a DAM object.

Chapter 5, Rendering Video and Audio explains how you will render audio and video using media content object, TypoScript Object, content elements, and rgmediaimages extension. You will play video using a custom media player and Flash Media Server. We will also create new plugins for rendering audio files.

Chapter 6, Connecting to External APIs shows how external services, specifically Amazon S3, Flickr, and YouTube, can be leveraged to expand the system. We pull in files from YouTube and Flickr. We also use Amazon S3 to provide us with limitless storage.

Chapter 7, Creating Services covers services and hooks powerful concepts in TYPO3, which allow individual sites to add different processing capabilities depending on the system. We use services to parse metadata, and convert files.

Chapter 8, Automating Processes describes how some processes and workflows could be automated; making the computer do all the hard work, while the editor oversees the process.

What you need for this book

In order to get the most from this book, there are some expectations of prior knowledge and experience. It is assumed that the reader has a good understanding of TYPO3, which can be achieved by reading the introductory tutorials—Inside TYPO3, TYPO3 Core API, and Modern Template Building guide—essential to understand how TYPO3 works. Basic TypoScript knowledge is required as well.

Who this book is for

This book is for anyone who is looking for effective systems for managing and operating with multimedia content. You will find this book interesting if you are running, or starting websites rich in multimedia content.

This book assumes some prior knowledge of TYPO3, which is available either from the official documentation, or other books on this topic.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."

A block of code is set as follows:

<IfModule mod_fcgid.c> AddHandler fcgid-script .fcgi SocketPath /var/lib/apache2/fcgid/sock IPCConnectTimeout 60 IPCCommTimeout 256 BusyTimeout 256 ProcessLifeTime 256 </IfModule>

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

class tx_myext_ftpDownload extends tx_scheduler_Task { public function execute() {
$connection = ftp_connect('ftp.software.ibm.com');
if (!$connection)

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

Shell> apt-get install apache2-mpm-prefork libapache2-mod-php5 php5-gd php5-mysql mysql-server-5.0

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Note

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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