Make your editor’s job easier with a customized TYPO3 backend

You have lots of options when it comes to tailoring the TYPO3 backend to your editor’s or admin’s needs. Here are a few of our favorites, based on client projects—and our own experiences—over the years.

Eliminate the guesswork around what will appear in social media teasers when you post the page to platforms like Facebook or Twitter. You can compose social media messages ahead of time, as a part of your content creation and approval process.

Admins can give editors access to the Redirects module in the TYPO3 backend. This helps you avoid the ghastly 404 “page not found” error that kills your search engine ranking, as your site structures, slugs, and page names change over time. TYPO3 gives you full control over source, destination, and type of redirect (301, 302, 303, 307).

As an admin, you can create as many users as needed. But the more you have, the more cumbersome and error-prone user access rights become. “Who can edit pages?” is a really complicated question! This presents some obvious additional security risks, too. “Did I remember to give a new editor access to everything she needs? Did I remove all the right permissions when he changed jobs?”

The solution is to group users with the same role—news editors, forum moderators, etc.—into user groups and define their access rights based on their jobs or tasks. In the case of a “news editor” user group, users should only be able to access and edit news pages, content elements used in news items, and the corresponding part of your website’s file system.

For some other great features, you’ll need help from a developer—but they’ll make your daily work in the TYPO3-Backend much easier. Ask your friendly TYPO3 dev to help you with these, too!

Some of your manual recurring tasks can be replaced with a customized backend module. The amount of effort worth investing in the module will depend on how frequently the task comes up or the potential savings involved in reducing errors, frustration, and support calls.

Here are two examples of problems solved by backend modules: 

• Need to manage process flows across sets of data? Make a bulk management UI. We’ve helped several clients simplify bulk-managing data. When one of our clients needed a better way to manage open purchase orders, we created a module with neatly arranged tables, allowing them to edit the data and move the orders on to the next step in the fulfillment process. 
• Need to edit one field across a set of content? Create a module with a single-use interface. A single-use interface allows you to edit specific fields or elements across pages. We did this for a client whose content editor logged in infrequently. Setting up a single-use interface made their tasks clearer and less prone to errors.

As a useful rule of thumb, a good backend module saves your editors time, rather than create more work.

We hope this post got you excited about the possibilities of setting up a simple, purpose-built backend for the people who work on your website every day. While TYPO3 comes with plenty to love out of the box, you can make it even simpler and easier for your editors with a few customizations. 

As people who live and breathe TYPO3 ourselves, we’ve given these features a lot of thought. And one of the things we love about working with clients is that they’re always coming to us with problems that inspire us to improve on the TYPO3 core. Let’s talk about solving your TYPO3 usability needs and challenges!