The Engineer is responsible for installing, configuring and possibly developing, the functionality which the others above work with, and for realising the work of the designer in code.

TYPO3 is a complex package, working in a complex software environment.

As such, the engineering is always going to be complex, simply because the flexibility can only be achieved by providing choice, and the nature of the beast requires a lot of choices to be available to the engineer or programmer.

Site engineers get involved in:

• the design of the system from a functional point of view
• implementing visual designs
• configuration of the system
• development of code for extensions

The objective of the engineer is to implement the Owner's objectives, in such a way that other roles do not get involved in the complex engineering, but rather deal with interfaces which are:

• accurately representative of their designs, and work across a range of browsers
• presented logically
• no more complicated than the functions which they have
• appropriate to their task description
• simplified to provide only the functionality they need

The engineer should leave content elements (the building blocks of pages) in a state where they can simply be dropped into place by contributors/editors.

TYPO 3's modular, extension-based design philosophy means that many problems already have solutions, and the open-source licensing means that the solutions can be customised and extended as necessary.  

Skills Required

Engineers need a grasp of typoscript, TYPO3's configuration language.

Other helpful languages are PHP, SQL and Javascript (though these are less needed in most site development programmes, and (X)HTML and CSS, which are pretty much essential for any web-related project.