I have to migrate a static HTML website to TYPO3. I know, I could read docus first, but I believe I will need to read some days first to only recognize which direction to run...
Do I have to learn TypoScript like
Default PAG
page = PAGE
page.typeNum = 0
page.20 = TEXT
page.20.value = HELLO UNIVERSE!
page.10 = TEXT
page.10.value = HELLO WORLD!
or is there another way to do it quickly? With markers?
thank you guys!
You will have to learn a little bit of TypoScript to do what you want. Sorry :-( But you won't have to learn that much, and what you do learn you'll be able to reuse when building other TYPO3 sites.
First thing: skip markers. Markers are a remnant of an old, deprecated templating system. The way you should be doing this is with TemplaVoila.
TemplaVoila works by giving you an interface to map TYPO3 content (or instructions to generate content) to blocks of markup in your HTML file. In other words, you take your static HTML file, then go through it and tell TemplaVoila "OK, that DIV is my sidebar, so put a list of all the site pages in there... that P is the footer, put a link to the privacy policy there... that DIV is the main content area, fill it with blocks of content created by the user," and so forth. This is a very powerful approach, because it means that if you work with other Web designers or graphic designers, they don't have to learn any special "magic tags" or markers; they can just give you well-formed HTML and with a few clicks you can turn it into a live template for a site. Pretty nifty.
There's a piece of TYPO3 documentation called "Futuristic Template Building" that explains pretty clearly how to go from a static HTML page to a TYPO3-ized site with TemplaVoila. Here's a direct link to the section of that doc that walks you through the process. (Don't be scared by the word "futuristic" into thinking that TemplaVoila isn't fully baked yet -- that doc was written six years ago, when TemplaVoila was pretty futuristic, but today it's quite mature and in use on TYPO3 sites all over the world.)
This should be enough to get you started, but if you hit roadblocks or can't wrap your head around it feel free to post your questions back to this thread and I'll help you out.
I'm reviving this, since a lot has happened since 2010.
There are multiple ways in TYPO3 to do the templating. All of them involve TypoScript, but in some there is only a minimal amount of TS needed.
Use "the old built-in way", doing all rendering in TypoScript and some HTML templates with markers in them. In this approach, you'd use the content elements provided by the core. Their rendering is defined with TypoScript in the core-extension "CSS Styled Content".
Use "the new built-in way". Here you'd also use the content elements provided by the core, and optionally self-defined ones. The rendering happens using the Fluid templating engine. You would do this using the core-extension "Fluid Styled Content". This is available since version 7.5.
Use a third party extension for content element rendering. I know of these:
Templavoilà - You probably should not use it, since it is not actively developed anymore, although there is a version claiming compatibility to TYPO3 7 LTS, but I don't know much about that.
FluidTYPO3 - This is a whole ecosystem of extensions with which you can define page templates and content element templates completely using the Fluid Templating engine (backend forms, backend preview and frontend rendering). It also provides a mechanism for nesting content elements.
DCE - Dynamic content elements. I don't know anything about them, you would need to read the docs.
Mask - TYPO3-core near wizard for own contentelements and pagetemplates. Uses database fields, not flexforms.
More extensions I don't know of.
It would be a bit much to explain all of these here in detail.
My current personal favorite is the FluidTYPO3 ecosystem, but I'm considering a switch to using Fluid Styled Content, because it is directly integrated into the core. I'm not sure if it supports nested content elements, so maybe one would need a separate solution for that (e.g. the extension gridelements).
Related
Are iframes still widely in use today?
I am coding a site with divs, and I want everything to appear in the container div. Is it possible to do it without coding the header + nav into each page and have the content show at the exact same spot without using iframes?
I did a quick Google search and found a post that said it's not possible, but my site will have quite a bit of links.
As of right now, I am coding it with Tumblr, and the hashtags in the posts would act as links to a section of posts (Ex: #blog would retrieve every post under the "blog" link). What are some widely used ways to target links on a website?
If you are creating a multi-page website, it would be helpful to have the HTML content be generated dynamically or be built statically from template files. You don't want to manually update the same content across multiple HTML files.
Dynamic Pages
There are several options for dynamically generating HTML content depending on the software available to you. For example, PHP is a popular language for web development and is available through many web hosts.
Static Pages
It is possible to build static HTML documents from templates using something like Jekyll.
I'm not sure if I'm interpreting what you mean by "coding it with Tumblr" correctly or not, but I think you mean you're making a Tumblr site with their built-in HTML editing capability.
I think you'll have a very difficult time achieving the behavior you desire there. I think you're trying to create something resembling a single-page application. Tumblr probably just allows basic static HTML with little Javascript. The suggestion Kyle made about using PHP or something like that won't work because that code must be executed on a server, and Tumblr doesn't provide that capability to my knowledge.
If you really want this kind of functionality, you probably should get some paid web hosting and develop your web development skills. It's not a simple task, but it's fun!
Sorry if I underestimated you or anything. Just trying to read between the lines. It seems to me that you may be relatively new to web development given the content of your post, and I'm trying to nudge you in the right direction constructively.
I have a site that wraps some user-generated content, and I want to be able to separate the markup for the layout, and the markup from the user-generated content, so the u-g content can't break the site layout.
The user-generated content is trusted, as it is coming from a known group of users on my network, but nonetheless only a small subset of html tags are allowed (p, ul/ol/li, em, strong, and a couple more). However, the user-generated content is not guaranteed to be well-formed, and we have had some instances of malformed user-generated content breaking the layout of the site.
We are working with our users to keep the content well-formed, but in the meantime I am trying to find a good way to separate the content from the layout. I have been looking into namespaces, but have been unable to find good documentation about CSS support for embedded namespaces.
Anyone have any good ideas?
EDIT
I have seen some really good suggestions here, but I should probably clarify that I have absolutely no control over the input mechanism that the users use. They are entering content into one system, and my page uses that system's API to pull content out of it. That system is using TinyMCE, but like I said, we are still getting some malformed content.
Why not use markdown
If your users are HTML literate or people that can grasp the concept of markdown syntax I suggest you rather go with that. Stackoverflow works great with it. I can't imagine having a usual rich editor on Stackoverflow. Markdown editors are much simpler and faster to use and provide enough formatting capabilities for most situations. If you need some special additional features you can always add those in but for starters oute of the box capabilities will suffice.
Real-time view for self validation
But don't forget to include a real time view of what users are writing. Self validation makes miracles so they correct their own mistakes before posting data.
Instead of parsing the result or forcing the user to use a structured format, just display the content within an iframe:
<iframe id="user_html"></iframe>
<script>
document.getElementById("user_html").src = "data:text/html;charset=utf-8," + escape(content);
</script>
I built custom CMS systems exclusively for several years and always had great luck with a combination of a quality WYSIWYG, strong front-end validation, and relentless back-end validation.
I always gravitate toward CKEditor because it's the only front-end editor that can deal with Microsoft Word output on the front end...that's a must-have in my books. Sure, others have a paste from word solution, but good luck getting users to use it. I've actually had a client overload a db insert thanks to Microsoft Word that didn't get scrubbed in Tiny. HTML tidy is a great solution to clean things up prior to validation on the back end.
CK has built-in templates and classes, so I used those to help my users format without going overboard. On the back-end I checked to ensure they hadn't tried any funny business with CSS, but it was never a concern with that group of users. Give them enough (safe) features and they'll never HAVE to go rogue.
Maybe overkill, but HTML
Tidy
could help if you can use it.
Use a WYSIWYG like
TinyMCE
or CKEditor that has built in cleanup methods.
Robert Koritnik's suggestion to use markdown seems brilliant, especially considering that you only allow a few harmless formatting tags.
I don't think there's anything you can do with CSS to stop layouts from breaking due to open HTML tags, so I would probably forget that idea.
I'm trying to create a theme for a CMS, but it's proving nearly impossible, as I have no understanding of PHP or ASP.NET. I can put a site together via CSS and HTML, but I want clients to be able to add and edit content themselves. I'm about ready to give up on designing one altogether and just use an existing theme.
I've had a go at trying to understand the inner workings of Wordpress, SilverStripe, Umbraco and Pixie, but the tutorials have left me confounded. Are there other CMSes I should be looking into for a more simplified theming process?
I'd really love to be able to just drop a chunk of code into the content area of a given HTML page, and make that region editable from a WYSIWYG front end that the client can log into. Is there such a thing?
Anything but DotNetNuke.
I'd recommend giving Wordpress another try.
I'm no web developer, just a an average Java/C# programmer who needed a web site and has some basic knowledge of HTML and CSS. What I did was find a theme that was similar to what I wanted, then started tweaking it incrementally. My theme is pretty basic, but before long I got a pretty good grasp of "The Loop" and printing out category and page links and such.
How about Movable Type?
You can (and should) edit the templates via the web interface, they are divided into separate modules, so you can concentrate on one area of the site, styling is of course handled via CSS.
It took me a few hours without any prior experience with this CMS to completely port a Wordpress theme to MT - I found the documentation very helpful and didn't even have to look elsewhere.
An awesome thing about MT - it generates static pages based on the templates you defined. Meaning, very low load on the server, you don't need to query the database on every request, etc. You could probably do the same/similar by activating the cache plugin (or is it built in now?) in Wordpress, but here it's the default modus operandi so it's more stable and integrated with the CMS.
Drupal with the zen theme (or a "lighter" version of it: Starkish theme) seems like a popular choice (and well deserved, too). It gives you a good starting point, it has great documentation and many modules available.
PS: I've added this as an additional answer so that it can be voted upon separately from my other suggestion - I just could not stop myself from bringing up the Drupal + zen combo :)
I worked with Joomla, it is really easy to have a theme for it without knowing any programming language. When you install it using a simple installer, there will be a folder named templates. There are three simple themes each in its own folder. Just copy one of them,change XML data for that theme ( just to name it and have some details, no programming ) and change the contents of CSS and HTMLs. every where you see something unrelated to HTML like , copy them!! Names are descriptive. so you can guess what do they do. give it a try!
I'd really love to be able to just drop a chunk of code into the content area of a given HTML page, and make that region editable from a WYSIWYG front end that the client can log into. Is there such a thing?
The only system I've come across with this kind of functionality is Perch.
Just create your website using HTML/CSS as usual and chuck in a few small php tags where you want editable content. These areas are then added to an admin area for your clients to edit.
The only drawback is it costs £35 per site - I don't know if there's a free/open-source CMS with this functionality...
It's difficult to say which CMS will be the best one for you (maybe your question should be made into a community wiki question).
I have a little experience with mojoPortal, and found it to be easily customizable. There's a lot of documentation about how to skin your CMS and there a lots of complete skins that you can use as a starting point.
There is also a demo site, where you can see how the CMS works for an end-user.
Take a look at Joomla. That was the first CMS that I really used, and I still think its templating engine is better than most of the others out there.
Its template system essentially lets you build a standard web page, and then use some simple tags to define where the content and modules would go. You can override the output of most external components and modules without too much trouble, and the vast library of third-party extensions should help you add a ton of functionality to your site without much coding on your part. Joomla also has a fairly easy-to-use administrative backend, so your clients should like it too.
This page for themeing Wordpress helped me a lot:
Theme Development
UPDATE
Xichael,
If you know HTML and CSS pretty well, but you just don't want to spend time learning the Wordpress framework, then I think this is a good option for you (again, I can relate to your situation). Use Wordpress with the new Toolbox starter theme. It's super minimal.
Toolbox: An HTML5 WordPress Starter Theme
Here's an example of what it looks like. Just "View page source" and go to town on the CSS!
I've thought about writing my own very simple CMS just for handling pages, i.e. you have some sort of template, and then a <div> in the middle to drop in text from a WYSIWYG editor. You could even use XML as the data store to eliminate having to set up a database to store the page content.
It would sort of be re-inventing the wheel though, because there is so much polished CMS software out there already, but it wouldn't be that hard because it wouldn't have 99% of the features most systems have. However, what happens when your client wants to add something in the future that's already standard in an existing CMS or plugin?
If you are looking for a simple CMS tool, CMSimple is as basic as it gets. A small PHP based CMS system that does not even require a database or XML.
"CMSimple is the ideal tool for a single user to maintain a website."
Original version here: CMSimple.ORG
Original plus 2 enhanced versions here: Download CMSimple
117KB content manangement system
no database required; the entire site is stored in a single HTML file
built in WYSIWYG
no modules or widgets, no blog, no comments, etc., just basic pages
uses PHP (but no database)
Get themes here: dotcomwebdesign.com
It seems the most common aproach to web design is to use HTML/XHTML & CSS in conjunction with other technologies or languages like Javascript or PHP.
On a theoretical level, I'm interested to know what other languages or technologies could be used to build an entire site without using a single HTML tag or CSS style for styling/positioning?
Could a website be made only using XML or PHP alone, including actual styling and positioning?
Presumably Flash sites are till embedded in HTML tags?
Thanks
There are actually several solutions that allow you to nearly completely avoid CSS and HTML.
GWT: Google Web Toolkit
Written in Java and will allow you to build both server and client code in Java. Used to build Google Wave.
Cappuccino and Objective-J:
Objective-J is to JavaScript as Objective-C is to C. It extends JavaScript with many near features, including type-checking, classes and types.
Cappuccino is like Cacoa (Mac OS X GUI toolkit).
Using these two you can build incredibly rich and desktop like webapps. They run mostly on the client side and you can use whatever you want on the server.
A good example is 280slides
SproutCore is similar to Cappuccino, but it uses pure JavaScript instead. Apple is using SproutCore to make me.com.
I should also mention that knowledge to HTML, CSS, JavaScript is a good skill to know, just like understanding your compiler is a good skill.
EDIT:
As said above Adobe Flash can also be used.
You can make a website with out a single html tag. Just give folder read access to all your directories, have sensible file names. From here you user will be able to browse images , read text files, download videos and depending on the content he may or may not come back ever again, but you do achieve the goal of setting up a "website" with out a single line of html or css or any other code for that matter.
:-) :-) :-)
You can host a telnet server with anonymous access and a specialized shell that restricts the user to doing whatever it is you want the site to do. ;)
Lets make the distinction between what is required by the web browser, and what you as a developer use to create that markup.
Remember that HTML nowadays is xml. You could use any markup language you like and convert that to HTML using XML.
eg ASP.NET uses markup such as which is converted on the server to .
As long as the content going down the wire to the browser is HTML, or generates HTML through script, you can use any approach you like.
However these approaches have mostly failed as developers prefer having direct control over the markup. It makes css as well as scripting much easier when you are certain what the html is going to be.
ASP.NET MVC is a product created in response to criticisms leveled at the ASP.NET webforms model.
Also, this is another answer because it's a completely different technology, but you can write an application in XUL and it'll run in Mozilla-based browsers without any HTML.
There's also XML. You can create websites with XML only. A well known one is World Of Warcraft. Check the page source. An XSL is used as stylesheet. There exist even XML based web frameworks like OpenLaszlo. You can let it serve either DHTML or Flash on reqeust out of a single XML template.
The Wt C++ Web Toolkit.
You can write your web application in C++ using Qt-style widgets (input boxes, buttons, tabs etc) and hook up client-side events to C++ code on your server. All without writing any HTML or CSS.
A sample application from their website (you may also want to look at this excellent tutorial):
HelloApplication::HelloApplication(const WEnvironment& env)
: WApplication(env)
{
setTitle("Hello world"); // application title
root()->addWidget(new WText("Your name, please ? ")); // show some text
nameEdit_ = new WLineEdit(root()); // allow text input
nameEdit_->setFocus(); // give focus
WPushButton *b = new WPushButton("Greet me.", root()); // create a button
b->setMargin(5, Left); // add 5 pixels margin
root()->addWidget(new WBreak()); // insert a line break
greeting_ = new WText(root()); // empty text
/* when the button is clicked, call the 'greet' method */
b->clicked().connect(this, &HelloApplication::greet);
}
void HelloApplication::greet()
{
/* set the empty text object greeting_ to greet the name entered */
greeting_->setText("Hello there, " + nameEdit_->text());
}
Curl (requires a browser plugin)
Wikipedia article
A webpage looks like this:
{curl 1.7 applet}
{value
let b:int=99
let song:VBox={VBox}
{while b > 0 do
{song.add b & " bottle(s) of beer on the wall,"}
{song.add b & " bottle(s) of beer."}
{song.add "Take one down, pass it around,"}
set b = b - 1
{song.add b & " bottle(s) of beer on the wall."}
}
song
}
Source
Since browsers view HTML, I'm assuming you mean create a site without ever having to edit/write HTML/CSS. The framework/app environment/whatever taking care of everything for you - yet still allowing you control over the presentation layer.
Seems like that is certainly possible on a theoretical level.
I ran across Noloh (not one line of html) a while back. Was intrigued, but never actually tried it out.
From various places on the Noloh site:
Because NOLOH does not rely on HTML or pages, maintaining complex rich Internet applications is significantly easier than with other methods.
Developing applications with NOLOH only requires using a single, unified language: a superset of PHP that completely maintains all aspects of server-client communication for you!
I think you could build a site entirely in SVG.
The front page of emacsformacosx is almost entirely SVG, for example.
Downsides: It wouldn't be viewable in IE (at least through version 8). And last I looked, text support, like flowing and justification, was weaker in SVG. (You could embed HTML inside an SVG element when you needed sophisticated text features, but that would violate your no-HTML rule.)
You'd probably still want to use CSS with SVG, because it's a good idea there for the same reason it's a good idea with HTML, but it wouldn't be necessary.
A website is always viewed through a browser (at least always if you are human :)). Browsers understand HTML. Whatever the technology - you have to basically render HTML. Even in cases with rich technologies like flash, the flash object that is rendered by a browser plugin is embedded inside the HTML.
In theory it is possible to do it without HTML, but the question becomes how much does the product diverge from the definition of a website...
One really short, simple answer... you can't :D
Flash requires an embed tag, an image requires an embed tag etc, so you'd have to use HTML in some method or another.
PHP is an embedded language, it is used to generate HTML on which the browsers renders, with XML, well technically a browser like Ie or FireFox will render it in it's own way for readability, but I would not class that as a website.
The major developments in the world of web technologies involves the development of HTML and CSS to improve them, there isn't any need for an alternative. In fact we're pushing towards a standard, what point would there be in introducing a new language to negate these standards. The whole IE saga would simply get worse.
Like the others have suggested, you could directly load an image or a flash file, but an image is useless on it's own, and a flash interface throws up loads of problems like SEO, accessibility etc, not least it's very heavy and usually completely misused. In my mind I wouldn't even class this method as a website, it just doesn't tick any of the boxes (IMO).
I think you can have an URL pointing directly at a hosted Flash (SWF) file, I've certainly done this though I don't know if all browsers work.
Anyhow, I tested this when developing MyDinos.
e.g: http://mydinos.com/home.swf
You can use Emscripten and its SDL subset.
You could try using quickstatic. You can code HTML templates from Python3. What is super cool about it is the fact that if you put in a for-loop for a certain item, you can generate that many items (maybe even use it to print items from a directory or quickly serve thousands of links).
Is there a way to embed only a section of a website in another HTML page?
Example: I see an answer I want to blog about, so I grab the HTML content, and splat it in somewhere, and show only that, styled like it is on stackoverflow. Basically, I want to blockquote the section of the page with original styling, if that makes sense. Is that something the site itself has to provide, or can I use an iframe and tell it to show only a certain element or something crazy? Open to all options, but I want it to show up as HTML, not as an image (that's really a last resort).
If this is even possible, are there security concerns I need to aware of?
Don't think image should really be last resort. You have no control over the HTML/CSS of the source page, so even if you craft a solution (probably by using JavaScript to parse out the desired snippet) there is no guarantee that tomorrow the site doesn't decide to change its layout.
Even Jeff, who has control over the layout of stackoverflow.com, still prefers to screen-capture the site, rather than pull in the contents live.
Now if your goal was to have the contents auto-update, that would be a different story. But still, unless you use some agreed-upon method of sharing content, such as RSS, your solution would be very fragile.
The concept you are describing is roughly what is called a "purple include" or "transclusions". There is a library out there for it, but its not exactly actively developed. Here's a couple ajaxian articles on it.
I'd recommend using a server side solution with Python; using urllib2 to request the page, then using BeautifulSoup to parse out the bit that you need. BeautifulSoup has a very flexible selection api with which you can craft heuristics for the section you are interested in.
To illustrate:
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
text = soup.find(text="Some text on the page that is unlikely to change")
print soup.parent.prettify()
That way if the webmaster later changes the markup on the page, your scraping script should still work.
On client side <iframe> is the only practical option. It is possible to scroll it, but it might not work in the long term, because it's technically close to clickjacking attack.
There's also cross-site XHR, but requires opt-in from destination site, and today works only in few latest browsers.
Getting HTML on server side is easy (every decent web framework has ability to download page and parse HTML and you can use XPath/XSLT or DOM to extract bit you want).
Getting styles however is going to be tricky – CSS rules may not work with HTML fragment taken out of context. You'd have to parse CSS, extract and transform rules or use browser and read currentStyle of every node.
Obviously you have to heavily filter HTML you extract to avoid XSS. It's harder than it seems.
If you don't need to automate this, a good HTML+CSS WYSIWYG editor might be able to extract content fragment with styles.
That sounds like something that IE8's Web Slices would be perfect for. However, it's only available in IE8, and the site of origin would have to implement for you to be able to take advantage of it.