Typo3页面树中元素的概述页面

Question

I'm primarily a UI and graphic designer and, eventhough I have some experience with Typo3, I'm completely stuck at the following problem:

I have a large page tree with single pages for items from a catalogue (one item per page), the layouts for these items are built with Armin Vieweg's beautiful "Dynamic Content Elements" extension (DCE) .

Now I want to create an overview page where I reference some of those items automatically - ideally I want to check a box in each element I want to display there (I would add a field catalogueItemPreview to the item DCE which authors can check or uncheck).

Unfortunately, I have no concrete idea of how the database is structured and how I could build a query (where would I even do that? in a custom-made plugin?).

This is how I imagine it could work: On the overview page I use a plugin/an extension in a Content Element that does the following:

1. search Typo3 DB for content elements with a field called "catalogueItemPreview"

2. return fields " catalogueItemTitle ", " catalogueItemShortDescription ", " cataloguePreviewImage "

3. use a template to render previews of all those elements on the overview page

I'm happy for ANY pointers towards a solution as currently I'm completely in the dark about where even to begin ...

Schematic screenshot from the Typo3 backend

Answer 1

thanks for using my DCE extension :)

Well the fields you have defined and their values in content elements are stored as XML, because the current version of DCE is based on Flexforms.

This makes it very very difficult to do MySQL queries using one of the field properties in WHERE clause. You could check for a xml string in the field pi_flexform but this is not recommended.

Instead I would use another property of content elements (tt_content) to mark the items as "Show on frontpage". For example you could create a new layout or section_frame value for that. Then it is very easy to just output the elements you want, using TypoScript.