About ETH Zurich

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) was founded by the Swiss government in 1854. Today the ETH Zurich comprises almost 100 institutes and laboratories, more than 350 professorships and about 850 lecturers. More than 8,000 faculty and staff members work in teaching, research and administration, and 14,000 students are registered.

Technology  : TYPO3
Application Type : Website
Application Scale : Medium

Project Overview 

The official website for this institute was developed using the TYPO3 CMS.

Addition of a blog application to this site was the primary objective of this project. Also blogs had to be permitted to be added from the front-end.This functionality was aimed at enabling posting of blogs by users during study trips so that the activities for each day were briefed in the website with pictures also included.

Technology Overview

TYPO3 is a free and open source content management systemas well as a Model–view–Controller (MVC) Web Application Development framework written in PHP.

TYPO3 has a web front-end, which presents a TYPO3 based website to its users, along with a web based backend, used by authors and site administrators to manage content for the website.

TYPO3 can run on Apache or IIS on top of Linux, Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X. It uses PHP 4 or 5 and any database system supported by the TYPO3 DBAL including MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQLand others. The system can be run on any web server. The frontend can be displayed in browsers such as Mozilla Firefox on any OS, with JavaScript.

Challenges/Issues

Typo3, by convention, did not support extensions to manage blogs from the front-end. Also, only limited resources were available on the web regarding this customization. Hence, implementing such a completely new functionality was a key challenge. Restricted time-frame was another key issue.

Solutions

In due course of time, we learned that TYPO3 came with an extension to maintain photo/image blogs. So, we made a complete study on how this Photo Blog extension could be customized to incorporate the functionality of adding blog entries from the front-end. As a result, we were successfully able to cater to the client’s needs and bring about an effective blog section to the website. Three dedicated PITS resources were involved in successfully executing this project.

Client Feedback/Gains

Numerous enhancements that were requested following the first release were implemented subsequently. The client was very pleased after all of them were completed within the specified deadlines. We continue to be in constant touch with this client through providing further website development services and through providing maintenance.

Successful completion of this project added another feather to the PIT Solutions TYPO3 team’s cap.