Glossary

TYPO3 Glossary

TYPO3 comes with a vocabulary of its own, and most of these words turn up in quotes and project meetings before anyone has explained them. Here they are in plain terms, each with the situation you actually run into it in.

  • Backend layout

    The definition of which content areas a page has and how they are presented to editors in the backend.

  • BFSG

    The German law obliging certain consumer products and services to be accessible. In force since 28 June 2025.

  • Caching

    The intermediate storage of rendered content, so TYPO3 does not recalculate everything on every request.

  • Composer

    The tool that manages and installs TYPO3, its extensions and their dependencies.

  • Content Blocks

    An approach for defining custom content elements compactly, instead of spreading the configuration across several files.

  • Extbase

    The framework used to build custom TYPO3 extensions with data models of their own.

  • Extension

    A package that adds features to TYPO3, from the sitepackage to a search engine integration.

  • FAL

    The file handling of TYPO3: every file is a record with metadata, not just a path in a directory.

  • FlexForm

    Extra settings fields per record, stored as XML in a single database column.

  • Fluid

    The template language of TYPO3. It decides how data is turned into HTML.

  • LTS

    Long Term Support: the period in which a TYPO3 version receives security fixes as a matter of course.

  • Mask

    An extension for clicking custom content elements together in the backend. No longer developed for TYPO3 v14.

  • Routing

    The rules by which TYPO3 builds addresses and resolves them back to content.

  • Scheduler

    The task scheduling of TYPO3, for everything that should happen regularly and without anyone doing it.

  • Site configuration

    The configuration that assigns a page tree its domain, its languages and its URL rules.

  • Site Set

    A named configuration package a site can include. Since TYPO3 v13 the intended way to reuse configuration.

  • Sitepackage

    The project's own extension, holding the templates, TypoScript and configuration of a TYPO3 site in one place.

  • Solr

    A standalone search engine that indexes TYPO3 content and does considerably more than the built-in search.

  • TCA

    The configuration that decides how database fields appear and are validated in the TYPO3 backend.

  • TSconfig

    The configuration of the TYPO3 backend, split into areas of the site (page TSconfig) and users (user TSconfig).

  • TypoScript

    The configuration language that decides what the TYPO3 frontend outputs and how it behaves.

  • Workspaces

    A working area where changes are made and reviewed before they appear on the live site.

Term cleared up. What now?

If the question turns into a project: we build, migrate and look after TYPO3 installations.