Configuring Extension Output with TypoScript for Extensibility and Reusability
Using TypoScript to configure your extension's output can change the way you approach writing plugins for TYPO3, making your code more reusable and your output more configurable. Everyone wins!
As a TYPO3 developer creating extensions for a wide range of clients, I often feel like I'm reinventing the wheel with very simple extensions that do very simple things, but that rarely seem portable enough to carry over to another client's site. Take, for example, something I'm sure we've all written in one way or another, a simple list of records, pulled from the database and displayed on a page in some order with some basic rules for transforming those database field values into presentable content. There always seem to be good reasons for creating such a simple extension from scratch (granted, few extensions contains only a list view, but our discussion of a list view can carry over into other views):
1) they're simple and don't take long to write,
2) they're just different enough to warrant a new extension,
3) a custom extension is what the client is paying for, so that's what they should get. Right?
Well, maybe sometimes. But usually the list mechanism is so basic that we almost certainly could abstract it from our code, and stick to the presentation side of things, which is the part that varies the most from extension to extension. Any extra business logic that needs to be added can be through savvy methods that I won't be discussing here.