VG Wort Pro—Automated Reporting for Professional Publishers

If you read Part 2 of this series, you already know our free extension, EXT:vgwort. It solves a specific problem: tracking pixels end up on the right pages, editors can assign them in the page properties, and the pixels render automatically in the frontend. For many websites, that’s enough.

But what happens when you’re managing pixels for 200 articles? When three authors publish regularly and each has their own VG Wort membership number (Karteinummer)? When you have to report texts to VG Wort on behalf of a publisher at the end of the year? That means copying every single text from the website, pasting it into T.O.M. (VG Wort’s METIS web portal), assigning authors, checking the minimum length, submitting, and tracking the status.

That’s when manual work becomes a real bottleneck, and that’s exactly where the VG Wort Pro extension (vgwort_pro) comes in.

• Part 1: VG Wort and TYPO3: What You Need to Know as a Publisher
• Part 2: EXT:vgwort: Tracking Pixels in TYPO3, the Easy Way
• Part 3: VG Wort Pro: Automated Reporting for Professional Publishers (this post)

First, one important point: the Pro extension doesn’t replace the free version. It builds on it. Everything you read in Part 2 about assigning pixels and rendering them in the frontend still applies. Pro adds a layer on top: communication with VG Wort through its METIS REST API.

There’s one more difference from Part 2. The free extension supports TYPO3 v13 and v14, but EXT:vgwort_pro requires TYPO3 v14. If you’re still on v13, you’ll need to upgrade first.

In practice, this means you no longer switch back and forth between TYPO3 and T.O.M. You handle all of your VG Wort tasks in the TYPO3 backend: ordering pixels, managing authors, reporting texts, and syncing status, all in one place.

Full METIS API Integration

The Pro extension uses eight endpoints of the METIS REST API, covering registration, author verification, pixel ordering, quality control, syncing, and URL management. Together, they cover the full lifecycle of a VG Wort text.

It supports both account types: publisher accounts (Verlag), for publishers and agencies reporting on behalf of their authors, and author accounts (Urheber), for individuals who publish their own work. You configure everything in YAML through TYPO3’s site settings. If you run a multi-site setup, you can store different credentials for each site.

The feature I personally consider essential is test mode. The extension can run against VG Wort’s test environment (tom-test.vgwort.de) before you report anything for real. When you’re setting things up for the first time, or building workflows for a client, that takes a lot of pressure off.

Pixel Pool Management

In the free extension, you assign pixels manually, one at a time. Pro introduces a pixel pool: a supply of tracking pixels that can be assigned to your pages automatically.

There are two ways to fill the pool. You can import the CSV file that VG Wort offers for download in T.O.M., or you can order pixels directly through the METIS API, up to 1,000 per request, without leaving TYPO3.

What happens behind the scenes sounds unspectacular, but it saves a lot of headaches in practice. Public and private codes are matched automatically, duplicates are detected and caught, and a lock function prevents assigned pixels from being changed by accident. In multi-site setups, each site has its own isolated pool, so a pixel from site A can’t accidentally end up on site B.

Author Management

As soon as more than one person writes for a site, author management matters. Pro gives you full author management (create, edit, and delete), with each author’s name and VG Wort membership number.

The big advantage over a manual list is that you can validate membership numbers directly against the VG Wort API. You check the number the moment you add an author, instead of finding out at year-end that it was wrong and your report has been rejected.

You can mark authors as inactive. That’s useful for former employees or guest authors who no longer write but whose older texts still need to be reported. You can also assign multiple authors to a page, which reflects how editorial teams work much better than a single author field.

Another often-overlooked advantage: in T.O.M., you can’t save a text report if an author’s membership number is missing, and everything you’ve entered is lost. That tends to happen at the worst possible moment, when you’re racing the year-end deadline and an author doesn’t have their number handy. With Pro, you can create authors in TYPO3 and assign them to pages before you know their membership number. That means you can prepare your entire report throughout the year, not just when the deadline is looming. Once you have the number, you add it and submit. No re-entering data, and nothing gets lost.

This is where it gets interesting, because text registration is the feature that eliminates most of the manual work.

Think about how it usually goes. You open your website in a browser, copy an article’s text, switch to T.O.M., paste the text, check whether it reaches the 1,800-character minimum, assign an author, submit the report, and make a note of the status somewhere. For 50 articles, that adds up to a full working day.

With Pro, you open text registration in the TYPO3 backend and select a page. The extension renders the live page, extracts the relevant content, and checks the minimum length automatically.

Why does that matter? Because a rendered page usually contains much more than the article itself. Navigation, footer, and sidebar are the obvious ones, but teasers for related articles, image captions, author bios, call-to-action blocks, and the like also end up in the HTML. Without markers, the extension would count all of it and send it to VG Wort. That skews the character count and submits content that isn’t part of the actual text.

The content extraction handles this smartly. You can set markers in your Fluid templates to define exactly which part of the page counts as the text to report, using the VgwortInclude and VgwortExclude Fluid partials that come with the extension. Register the partial path once in your TypoScript configuration:

Then you can use the partials in your Fluid templates. They work as wrappers: wrap the relevant area in VgwortInclude, and wrap any sections that shouldn’t count toward the character count (code blocks or teasers, for example) in VgwortExclude:

Without markers, the extension falls back to the <main> element, and then to <body> as a last resort.

Under the hood, a middleware strips the markers from regular frontend responses, so visitors never see them. Text registration requests the page internally with the query parameter ?vgwort-markers=1, which keeps the markers in place so the extraction knows which part of the page is relevant. These requests automatically get Cache-Control: private, no-store.

Before a report goes out, editors see the extracted text in a modal dialog. They can check whether navigation, the footer, or other irrelevant sections slipped in, and adjust the text if needed. In the same dialog, you set the type of contribution for each page (author or translator), so the same person can be reported as the author on page A and as the translator on page B. For publisher accounts (publisher: true in the site settings), there’s also a checkbox for publisher participation, which lets the publisher opt out of its share of the royalties for that page. For author accounts, this option is hidden. Only then does a single click send the report to the METIS API. After that, the extension tracks the registration status automatically.

That might sound like a small difference, but do the math. If each text takes five minutes by hand (copying it, cleaning up the formatting, pasting it into T.O.M., assigning the author, and submitting), 100 texts add up to more than eight hours of work. With Pro, it’s a few clicks per text, and the extension does the rest.

Pro comes with its own backend module under Web > VG Wort, with views for the different management tasks. The most important ones:

• Pool management shows your current pixel supply: which pixels are assigned and which are still available.
• Pages without pixels lists every page that doesn’t have a tracking pixel yet. On large sites with hundreds of subpages, this is worth its weight in gold, because otherwise you’re guaranteed to miss a few.
• Author overview lists all the authors you’ve added, along with their validation status.
• Text registration brings together the reporting workflow described above.

If you want to compare T.O.M. with TYPO3, the sync view shows any discrepancies, such as pixels assigned to a different text in T.O.M. than in TYPO3. The sync covers the last 36 months. Older reports aren’t included.

Dashboard Widget

If you use the TYPO3 Dashboard, there’s an optional widget with a status overview for each site. How many pages are missing a pixel? Are there unverified authors? Which texts are too short to report? How’s the pool looking? You get a quick overview when you open the backend, instead of clicking through several modules.

On a single-editor site, permissions aren’t an issue. But as soon as more people are involved (editors who write the texts, someone responsible for VG Wort reporting, maybe an external service provider), they matter.

Pro offers five fine-grained permission levels through Page TSconfig: upload (CSV import), order (API pixel ordering), validate (author verification), report (text registration), and sync. Admins bypass these restrictions automatically. This lets you, for example, allow an editor to prepare texts for reporting without letting her submit the report herself.

Multi-site is fully supported. Configuration, pixel pools, and author databases are isolated per site. For agencies running several client projects on one TYPO3 installation, that’s a must.

If you use TYPO3 Workspaces, note that Pro works with live data. There’s no deep workspace integration. What the extension does do is detect when an editor is working in a workspace and show a notice that VG Wort actions are based on the current live version. Texts still in draft should only be reported once they’re published, but that’s up to your editorial team.

The Pro extension’s marker middleware is always active. It strips the HTML markers from regular frontend responses, so visitors don’t see them in the page source, and it makes sure internal extraction requests (?vgwort-markers=1) aren’t cached (Cache-Control: private, no-store). There’s no built-in consent logic. Whether and how you cover VG Wort tracking from a data protection perspective is your responsibility as the site operator.

I want to be honest here, because I believe that helps more in the long run than any sales pitch.

The free extension is enough if you run a manageable website with a handful of pages that need tracking pixels. If you report five or ten texts in T.O.M. once a year, doing it by hand is perfectly reasonable. In that case, use EXT:vgwort and save yourself the license fee.

Pro is worth it if one or more of these apply to you:

• You manage dozens or hundreds of pages with tracking pixels.
• Several authors write for you regularly.
• You report as a publisher on behalf of your authors.
• You’re an agency managing several TYPO3 sites that need VG Wort.
• Reporting texts by hand in T.O.M. eats up one or more working days every year, time you could spend on something better.

All Pro features (pixel ordering, text reporting, syncing, and author validation) run through the METIS REST API. Publisher accounts have API access by default. Personal author accounts don’t.

As an author, you first need to request API access in T.O.M. under Optionale Zusatzfunktionen (“optional additional features,” also known as Verlagsfunktionen für Urheber, or “publisher features for authors”). This isn’t automatic. VG Wort reviews each request, and activation can take a while, or may not be granted right away. My recommendation: request API access before you install Pro. Without active API access, Pro’s core features won’t work.

When you set up your API key in T.O.M., you’ll notice that the description mentions WordPress. That’s misleading. API access works with any CMS, so of course it works with TYPO3 too.

One more practical note: author accounts are limited to around 4,000 pixels per year. For a blog or a modest website, that’s usually not a problem, but it can matter if you have a very large content library. Once API access is active, both account types use the same API endpoints. The only differences are how you get access and how many pixels you can order.

If you run a small blog, don’t have API access, or would rather skip the application process, the free extension will serve you well.

If you already use EXT:vgwort, upgrading to Pro is seamless. Because Pro builds on the free extension rather than replacing it, all the pixels you’ve already assigned and your frontend integration stay as they are. Install the Pro extension, add your API credentials to the site settings, and you can start using pool management and text reporting right away. There’s no data to migrate.

EXT:vgwort_pro will be available under two licenses: a blogger license and a publisher license. We’re finalizing the details and pricing right now. Get in touch if you’re interested or want to know which option fits you best.

You’ll find the free EXT:vgwort extension on GitHub and through Composer. A landing page with full details on Pro features and licensing options is available here.