TYPO3 PROVIDERS
Although Typo3 is open source and free, various companies provide assistance with installation and use. Here are some examples:
Alopix Software - provides Pronomion software for installing and managing Typo 3.
Saman Designs - free demo site run by a website design company. Registration and then login with a password are required.
Tek Development - offers Typo3 set up and hosting; can customise sites.
Typo Systems helps develop sites using popular and well-tested Open Source software, including Typo3.
TYPO3 USER NOTES
Typo3.com - the main home of Typo3. If you have just started using Typo3 for your website, the following notes may help.
(1) The main menu for the backend is always shown at upper left after you have logged in. Also shown is a list of programmes that you can use for adding or editing information in the pages that you have access to. You can click on those, to get into the system and start using it, but usually you will want to click on "page" to see a tree diagram of your main page and sub-pages. After the tree has loaded onto your screen, you can click on any part of it, to start working on that part.
(2) To see the results of you actions at any time, click on the logo with a small magnifying glass lens. This will save your work on the host computer in New Zealand, and take you to the front end view that ordinary visitors will see if your page is not hidden. Any page can be hidden by clicking on the hide box, to put a check mark in it. This can be done for each element of page content, as well as for the entire page (in the page header editing view).
(3) In the backend, the site tree-structure (index to pages) can be viewed simultaneously alongside the editing pages by splitting your window view vertically into two parts. Using the split view is a great time-saver.
(4) When you first look at a page, after clicking on the page in the site map (tree diagram), you will be given a horizontal bar showing "page header", "move page", "new page", and "new content". Click on the page header button to edit the page header details (these affect how it will be identified in the main menu when the page is made public, and also determine what invisible information is available to computer search engines that are looking for information in the keyword and description fields, if you choose the "advanced" header option rather than the "standard")
(5) If a red box with "Preview" appears at the bottom of your screen, when looking at the front end view, this meand that only you can see it. The screen view you are looking at will not be visible to ordinary visitors.
(6) Depending on what kind of internet browser you are using, you will be able to modify the appearance of text using standard commands like those for italics and bold and underline. If no menu for such commands is apparent, it means that you have to hand-type html code around each piece of text that you want to modify. (For example, for bold, use < > brackets with b inside, and no spaces, then your text and then a second pair of < > brackets around a slash mark and b, again with no spaces inside the brackets).
(7) See Devguru for a well-organised survey of coding. For the preceding I used arial, helvetica; blue colour, and size 5 font. The code looked like this (I have used round brackets instead fo sharp ones at the fornt and eend of this code sequence): (font face="arial, helvetica" color="blue" size="5")(7) See Devguru for a well-organised survey of coding.(/font)
