Extbase Routing, Finally Explained — and the Docs Keep Growing

A few weeks ago, I reported that the rebuilt Extbase documentation was online and growing. Since then, the chapter people have asked for most has landed.

Extbase routing is where a lot of developers get stuck and the new Routing chapter comes to the rescue. It walks the whole path from a clean URL back to a controller action—the plugin enhancer, route paths and arguments, and the mappers that turn a slug into a record.

It contains examples and a Common Mistakes section, built from the questions that come up again and again. If you have ever fought with routeEnhancers and given up, this is the chapter to read.

Routing did not arrive alone.

• The Validation chapter is online, along with file uploads in the domain model.
• The first parts of Persistence have landed too: how to build a query, and how relations really work behind the scenes.
• Configuration is covered as well, including the parts that are not TypoScript.

The funded work runs until the end of August. Still to come: the rest of Persistence, the Caching chapter, and a chapter on hardening frontend plugins. Caching carries a message worth repeating early: switch off the cache, and performance becomes your responsibility.

This documentation gets better when it reflects real-world pain. If Extbase has ever surprised you — a stubborn cHash that keeps breaking your URLs, a relation that would not save — tell us. Open an issue or a pull request, and it might become an entry on the list of common pitfalls that saves the next developer a day of work.

This work to overhaul the Extbase documentation is a community budget idea funded by the TYPO3 Association on behalf of its members. Thank you for voting for it.