This blog post is about where and how to get support for your questions about TYPO3. I will show you seven channels where you can get your questions answered.
RTFM – Read the fine manual
Agreed … this is probably not what you wanted to hear at first. But there is much effort put into the documentation of TYPO3 right now in order to improve it. For a short introduction to TYPO3 documentation, you should have a look at my blog post series:
- User interface – How does it work?
- Content structure – Where to find what?
- How to contribute – How to fix errors in the documentation?
Ask Google
This also may sound quite common, but often this step is much underrated. In most cases you are not the first one with the question or problem.
If you face an error message, paste the complete message into the search field and delete just timestamps, usernames and other individual data. You will be surprised how many hits you get.
In other cases add as much information as possible to the search. IMHO it is better to remove search terms than to add them later, because you wasted time in checking non valuable results.
Social Media
Social media like, Twitter, Facebook and Google+ are quick stop-overs, where you can get a first hint how to solve an issue. My experience shows that it is more like “Look here, look there”. The information shared are mainly anchors, where to look for further information.
On Twitter, you should use the hashtag “#TYPO3”, because many people are running a search for this hashtag in order to help and provide information (like myself).
On Facebook I know of two TYPO3 related groups: A german and a english speaking group. The german speaking group has over 1400 members and is quite active regarding support issues. You can find the english speaking group here.
If you are on google plus, there are also two communities: one for english folks with over 1900 member and for german folks with over 400 members. The activity seems much lower here than on Facebook and Twitter.
Slack
You will find the TYPO3 community also on Slack. Slack is primarily a chat application, which offers some nice integrations to other services. If you do not already have a slack account, you should head over to https://forger.typo3.org/slack for instant access to https://typo3.slack.com/messages.
On Slack there are about 320 channels available, which are covering most (or all) of the topics in the TYPO3 world. Channels are available for many, very specific topics and extensions. The good thing is, that in those channels, you will find many people knowing a lot of a topic. The chance to get it answered is quite high.
But the bad things is: The questions and answers “fly by”. You probably will not scroll back though the whole history of a channel, to search for your issue. Furthermore the created content is not indexable by search engines, because it is not public. StackOverflow is the service, that helps to circumvent these issues.
StackOverflow
StackOverflow is a Q&A (Questions and Answer) platform for technical questions. This platform is the recommended one, if you have questions regarding TYPO3.
You should ask your question there and tag it at least with #TYPO3. Several people have a search running for this tag. So your question will pop up in their search and they will try to help you. With additional tags regarding an extension name or a version number, you can add more classification.
After asking the question on StackOverflow, you can copy the URL of your question and head back to Slack and post the link in an appropriate channel.
Mailing-lists, newsgroups and forums
Just for completeness: There are various “old” support channels … The TYPO3 mailing-lists, newsgroups and forum. A web frontend is available under the URL https://forum.typo3.org. Mailing-lists can be subscribed via lists.typo3.org. The same url is valid for subscribing to the lists via the news protocol. All three channels are connected bidirectional. But before using them, you must know, that the traffic became very low in the recent years.
There are other forums which are run by companies such as typo3.net or http://www.typo3forum.net/. Unfortunately both forums are solely in german and have no international support.
Professional TYPO3 support
There are definitely cases where free support is not sufficient. This may have various reasons: complexity, privacy, time frame. This is the point where professional support comes in.
A lot of agencies and freelancers are offering services around TYPO3. But which or who is the right one? Where to look for?
The first stop should be the official partner listing of the TYPO3 GmbH at https://typo3.com/our-services/find-a-typo3-partner/official-typo3-partner-finder/#/list. There you will find all current partners and members of the former professional services listing. For the time of writing these are mainly agencies, but special programs for freelancers and webhosters are in the making.
If you did not find an appropriate partner there, you can have also a look at the list of TYPO3 Association members at https://typo3.org/association/membership/members/. With a membership in the TYPO3 Association these persons and agencies show their dedication to TYPO3. In most cases this is also a hint, that there is deeper TYPO3 knowledge available.
You can also check the certification listings. These list all persons, who successfully passed an exam. Currently is an integrator and a developer listing. You can contact them or their employer in order to get professional services. A listing for Certified TYPO3 Consultants is on its way and will be published, when the first exams are successfully passed.
Conclusion
There are at least these seven ways to get TYPO3 support and to get your questions answered. If you know other channels, I would be happy, if you drop a note in the comments of this blog post.
I hope, that this blog post is interesting to you. If so or if you know somebody, who could profit from it, please share this post via your favorite social network. For your convenience I added some share buttons at the end of this page.
Credits
I found the blog post image on pixabay . miapowterr published it under the CC0 public domain license. I modified it using pablo on buffer.