Easier Page Links for Editors

Over the last few years, I’ve seen a similar request from many churches and organizations managing large websites with TYPO3.  These groups have invested considerable time in configuring TYPO3 to be used by a large number of editors, each of whom are responsible for a small section of the site. The editors only have permission to make changes within their section of the site and in the interest of usability these editable pages are the only ones even mounted and visible in the TYPO3 backend.

At first glance, this sounds like a great setup.  Editors are able to focus on their pages and don’t get lost within all the other content of the site. In day to day use, however, this causes one major headache: linking to other pages on the site.  In TYPO3, the main pagetree and its settings are used when creating internal links to other TYPO3 pages. If you can’t see a page, you can’t link to it either (at least not without hardcoding the URL, which opens up whole other set of issues). This means an editor cannot create a link from his section to another section.

When a church runs into this problem, my stock answer has always been “Yeah, that would be great.  Unfortunately, its not possible.”  Ron Hall and I were talking about this last week and once again I gave the standard answer. Much to my suprise, I found out that I’ve been answering incorrectly since the release of TYPO3 4.2 several weeks ago.

TYPO3 4.2 now supports User TSConfig for read-only page mounts and file mounts.  Practically speaking, this means its now possible to allow editors to link to pages or files without actually allowing them to write to those locations.  In the example below, the first line of Typoscript defines what directories (and files within) an editor can link to. The second line defines the root page where TYPO3 page links are allowed. Any pages below this are also allowed so it can typically be set to the main page of a site.

options.folderTree.altElementBrowserMountPoints = _temp_/,templates
options.pageTree.altElementBrowserMountPoints = 34

Page Browser with Read-Only Mount

File Browser with Read-Only Mount

Thanks to Kasper Skårhøj for the implementation and Steffen Kamper for bringing it to my attention. Steffen is working on a small patch to bring this behavior to the Rich Text Editor in TYPO3 4.2.2 as well.