Introduction¶
The higher education package is a TYPO3 package which comes with content elements, frontend templates and advanced functions needed by universities. It is updatable, meaning that in opposite to other TYPO3 kickstart distributions, the user will be able to update the package afterwards and benefit from bugfixes and new features.
During development, the focus is on sustainability, updatabilty and accessibility rather than on rapid development of new features.
The package should help editors without deep knowledge of the content management system creating good websites rather than providing the utmost flexibility.
Integrators and administrators can include their customizations and still keep the ability to update the package in the future.
The product vision¶
The higher education package is a TYPO3 based Enterprise CMS solution for universities and other educational institutes.
It allows to set up a full featured website including the most important features and content types needed by universities.
It is updatable, customizable and extendable and will be professionally supported for at least five years to come.
Basic principles¶
Updates¶
The higher education package will be updatable. That means, changes should not be made in the package itself but in an additional package (eg. “higher_education_package_custom”). In order to make updates as easy and smooth as possible, best practices for customizations will be recommended in the documentation.
Customers of the paid version can take advantage of support from the support team.
Customization¶
Main settings can be customized without touching the templates or SCSS files (eg. logo, colors and font).
As said, the higher education package will be customizable by adding an additional package. An example package is planned to be provided. In order to make customizations as easy as possible, the templates and settings will be very finely grained. That makes it easier for integrators and developers to overwrite only small parts of the package.
The default templates for content elements provided by fluid_styled_content have been rewritten, so that they’re more modular and easier to maintain.
Extendable¶
Of course other extensions can be used together with the higher education package. In fact, some extensions are already planned to be used together with the higher education package, eg. “news”.
Documentation¶
A documentation will be provided for editors, administrators and developers. That should make it easy for editors to use the package and allows editors and administrators to customize the template or add individual features without too much searching at the same time.
Flexibility vs. Guidelines for Editors¶
During development there are often multiple ways to implement a feature. When it comes to the question “should the editor have the maximum of flexibility or should the editor be guided” the higher education package chooses the second way: The page templates, content and navigation elements will provide as much flexibility as needed, but will focus an a consistent design throughout the website.
That includes using fixed page templates (based on backend layouts) instead of super-flexible grid systems (eg. “gridelements” extension) and reducing the display options for content elements.
Feature Inclusion¶
The package is planned to provide many of the features needed by universities and other higher education organizations. Some features are planned to be implemented in several ways (eg. the main menu, news listing templates etc.) in order to provide alternatives to the user.
The list of features will evolve over time. Since the package is updatable, customers of the higher education package will benefit from features implemented in the future.
See Features
Releases¶
Major versions will be released corresponding to the TYPO3 LTS versions.
The higher education package version 1 is meant to be used with TYPO3 8 LTS.
Since TYPO3 version 9 the naming scheme for the higher education package has changed: The higher education package version 9.X.X is compatible with TYPO3 9 LTS etc.
Major versions will be released shortly after the release of the TYPO3 LTS versions.
Minor and patch versions will be released in between. Since the development of the higher education package uses SCRUM, those versions will be released at the end of sprints.
Access to the Package¶
Public version¶
A publicly available version will be available with public access to a git repository provided by the TYPO3 GmbH. This version can be used to evaluate the package. It will be updated regularly.
Access to the main repository and support (paid version)¶
The paid version allows access to the latest bugfixes and features by directly accessing the main git repository provided by TYPO3 GmbH.
Support is included for questions and bug fixes.
A voting mechanism is planned to be implemented in order to allow voting for features.
Further development and updates are guaranteed to the users of the paid version.