Reason #11: TSConfig

It's a blessing—and sometimes a curse—that TYPO3 is highly configurable. Many fields, buttons, and UI widgets can be turned on or off for different types of backend users, and at CIC we pay a lot of attention to the backend user experience. Read on to see an example of the TSConfig that we use in our starter package that serves as the foundation of most new TYPO3 sites we build.

TSConfig, for those of you who aren't familiar with it, it used to control the back-end experience. Now, TSConfig isn't exactly one of TYPO3's proudest features. There are some real problems with how TSConfig was originally implemented. For one, there's an artificial distinction between User TSConfig and Page TSConfig, and it's time consuming and irritating to try to track down whether a setting belongs in User or Page configuration. Similar to Typoscript, there are also a number of naming inconsistencies in TSConfig, which hopefully the project will one day bite the bullet and clean up. That said, it's still an important part of TYPO3, and an essential part of configuring the backend. Also, if you're smart and reuse configuration between TYPO3 projects, then you really only need a solid TSConfig starting point that you can use on multiple sites.

Nobody ever accused TYPO3 of lacking features—it is without a doubt the most feature-complete open source content management system. The downside to this strength, however, is that for many sites there are a number of features enabled that are really not needed. For example, sites that aren't localized into multiple languages or that don't use workspaces or versioning suffer from extra UI elements in the backend that should simple be turned off. Moreover, TYPO3 has a history of providing users with multiple ways of doing the same thing, which—in my view—is more often a problem, as users struggle to find the correct way to accomplish a task. At CIC, we try to solve this problem by starting with a backend that has a lot of functionality turned off. For example, we disable the new page and new content icons at the top of the page module and instead encourage users to use the page tree to create new pages and the content areas in the page module to create new content elements.

We accomplish these small changes to the backend with a TSConfig file that we include on most sites we build. For anyone who's interested, I'm including the file below the fold. Let us know in the comments if it helps, or if you have any little TSConfig gems of your own to add.

Default Page TSConfig:

And, as a bonus, our default User TSConfig: