How to customize the TYPO3 Backend for the needs of each editor

Tutorial presented at the International TYPO3 Conference 2009 in Frankfurt by Riona Kuthe and Jochen Weiland (jweiland.net)

TYPO3 is one of the most flexible content management systems available on the market - no matter whether you look at commercial or open-source products.

This flexibility in terms of design, functions, features and backend configuration however comes at a price: it takes time and effort to go through all the configuration settings. Therefore in many cases the editors simply are assigned administrator rights - then everything is working (and possible).

However this approach has two significant disadvantages: 

• having admin rights the editors have access to every function and setting in TYPO3. They could use this to make unwanted changes to the whole system - including making it non-functional and giving access to sensitive data
• Editors being presented with all the admin functions don't feel comfortable working with TYPO3. They will get the long lasting impression that TYPO3 is cumbersome and difficult to use (in reality it is no more difficult to use than a word processor)

This tutorial shows a best-practice configuration for the various types of backend users. We don't claim that it is the perfect solutions, but it has been derived from many years of experience from many TYPO3 projects. All the configuration settings are made available on this website, including a .t3d-file which can be used to import the sample configuration for user groups and users in your own project.