TYPO3 Agency for Regensburg and Eastern Bavaria

TYPO3 Agency Regensburg

Regensburg is the easternmost point of the area we cover and economically one of the strongest: automotive suppliers, electronics, a university, and tourism around the World Heritage old town. The sites vary accordingly, from a technical product site to a multilingual visitor portal.

Technical products, presented comprehensibly

The supplier base around Regensburg lives on products that need explaining: variants, data sheets, technical characteristics, often in several languages for international customers. That content is not meant to be typed into the CMS; it should come from an ERP or a PIM.

TYPO3 is well set up for this: custom data models through Extbase, interfaces to existing systems, free output in the frontend. The first thing we settle is the behaviour when something fails. A defined state matters more than the fastest import.

Multilingual for international customers

Where customers sit worldwide, a translation layer is not enough. It calls for a decision on whether languages run in directories or on separate domains, what happens to untranslated content, and how the language links for search engines are generated.

Those questions belong at the start. Afterwards, every change to the URL structure drags redirects behind it. There is more under TYPO3 SEO.

The distance, stated openly

At a good 300 kilometres, Regensburg is the furthest point in the area we cover. We do not gloss over it: for the daily work it makes no difference, for meetings at short notice it does. What we promise we keep; what we cannot deliver we say beforehand.

International means more than translated

Suppliers with customers in several countries rarely need a straight translation. Markets differ in product range, in tone and sometimes in the legal details.

TYPO3 can represent that when the structure is settled early: languages in directories or on separate domains, defined behaviour when a translation is missing, clean language links for search engines. The rule broken most often: a link may only appear where the translation genuinely exists, and a pointer into nothing is worse than no entry at all. At length under multilingual sites.

Long distances demand good operations

The greater the distance, the more it matters that operations work without on-site visits at short notice. That is not a limitation but simply good practice; it is just more noticeable here.

In practice that means a reproducible deployment route, backups whose restore has been tested, monitoring that speaks up before anyone phones, and scheduled tasks whose absence gets noticed. What an environment needs for that is under hosting requirements; what ongoing care covers is under TYPO3 maintenance.

In an incident, access to the server and the code is there in minutes. A car is not, which is why we solve faults remotely anyway.

Common questions

Regensburg is a good 300 kilometres away. Is that not too far?

Not for the work itself: development runs in Git, discussion over video calls, and every change is visible in advance on a separate environment. You cannot tell the distance from the result.

For on-site meetings it is noticeable, and we say so openly. We come for kick-offs and training, but we plan those meetings deliberately and combine several reasons into one trip. If frequent presence matters to you, an agency from eastern Bavaria is the more honest choice.

Our product data sits in the ERP. Do we have to maintain it twice?

No, and you should not. Product data belongs where it originates; the website fetches it. TYPO3 can take that data over through an interface and present it freely in the frontend.

The effort sits less in the import than in the edge cases: what happens when the other side goes down, how are changes detected, which side counts as the truth. We settle that beforehand rather than in production.

Our TYPO3 version is several years old. How bad is that?

That depends less on the age than on the set of extensions. The core updates comparatively well; the effort arises with extensions that have no compatible release and with custom code relying on things that have been removed.

So it starts with a list: every extension assessed on its own. Experience says a portion of them falls away with no replacement, installed for an occasion and forgotten afterwards.