Marketing Factory Consulting GmbH extension developments

How do you integrate suitable Amazon products into the content of an article?

This or similar questions occur to the operator of a website at the very latest when he wishes to draw his visitors’ attention to specific products relevant to an article by linking to them at the end of the article.

Amazon PartnerNet provides a range of options to solve this problem – but up to now there has not been a really good integration to TYPO3 CMS. When you come to check the availability of a linked product, you have to check all product integration manually in terms of their functionality.

The amazon_affiliate extension provides a solution to these problems. Apart from its extremely simple installation and integration of products, the extension also provides the possibility of automatically monitoring all active products in the backend. This lets the operator regularly recognise the points at which a product needs to be replaced. The "SearchAndAdd" or "Bestsellers" modules in the extension also provide the option of presenting what, in Amazon’s view, are the most relevant products for a specific keyword or a certain category. Matching and relevant products are therefore always displayed to visitors.

amazon_affiliate is compatible with all TYPO3 installations from the LTS version 6.2 onwards.

Marketing Factory is making the extension available to the entire TYPO3 community. It has been available to  download since November 2013. The extension manual is also available  here .

Attacks on TYPO3 systems occur from time to time, albeit infrequently. The hackers use automated systems – known as bots – to carry out these attacks, which use different password combinations to attempt to access the systems. The aim of these attacks is to obtain sensitive company or customer information.

Although the TYPO3 community is constantly working to improve the security of TYPO3 and there are already many solutions to recognise these attacks, no solution has yet been found to generally prevent these attacks.

mfc_belogin_captcha is an extension created by Sebastian Fischer, our Senior TYPO3 Developer and certified TYPO3 Integrator, which prevents the hacking of passwords by automated systems as soon as this has occurred.

After a certain number of failed logins, a CAPTCHA is displayed, which must be completed in addition to the correct access data. As is known, automated systems cannot complete a captcha and so further attacks are prevented by the appearance of this captcha alone. However, the extension ensures that the content managers of a system can still log in to the backend even after five failed logins due to typing errors.

The extension mfc_belogin_captcha generates the captchas using the new Google reCAPTCHA. As the bots are being programmed to become increasingly intelligent, the known combinations of numbers or letters are often no longer adequate to verify a "human user". Instead, reCAPTCHA uses images of numbers, image sequences or simple tick boxes to differentiate humans from bots. The latter cannot (or at least cannot yet) solve these. Apart from improving the security of TYPO3 systems and offering protection against hacker attacks, the extension also provides the major advantage that TYPO3 backends can continue to be used unrestrictedly even during an ongoing attack.

Marketing Factory is making the extension available to the entire TYPO3 community. The extension has been available to download since September 2013.

The extension mfc_canonical offers the option of explicitly placing an individual canonical tag on each page.

Installing this extension eliminates the need to "build" a canonical tag into every page yourself. Using mfc_canonical, it is possible to quickly and simply place a canonical tag for every page and in every language – even when using a TYPO3 installation with a single tree and multiple language versions.

The extension can be used in all TYPO3 installations from version 6.2 LTS onwards and is also compatible with the latest TYPO3 version – 7 LTS.

Marketing Factory is making the extension available to the entire TYPO3 community and it is available to download at typo3.org.

We developed the extension mfc_feed to be able to show our visitors the latest topics and discussions from our "Heimwerker "Do-it-yourself" Forum". The extension is currently being used on the heimwerker.de portal, which was run by Marketing Factory between 1996 and September 2016.

When developing the extension, there was a particular focus on caching:

the plug-in itself is not cached, but features an internal cache that expires every 30 minutes. The forum is accessed again at the end of the 30 minutes to check whether there is new content. If yes, the older topics are replaced by the latest ones.

This intensive focus on caching makes it difficult to debug mfc_feed, as the error sources comes from TYPO3 as well as from the forum.

The extension has not been published due to its enormous complexity, as it is ultra-complicated to integrate and maintain, and presents a number of obstacles to inexperienced TYPO3 integrators.

Please get in touch with us if you are interested in the extension or would like to receive more information about it.

Meta tags (also known as meta information) are little snippets of programs by means of which additional  information can be rovided about a web page. 

They are stored in the "head" area of the page source and generally provide structured information for search engines.

Apart from the most important meta tags (title tag, meta description and meta robots tag), there are a number of other meta tags, including open graph meta tags, which define the most important content for sharing web pages in social networks.

The extension mfc_htmltag enables the existing meta tags to be quickly and simply extended with additional meta information without it having to be manually installed in the source text of the web page. The extension automatically adds the additional meta information at a sensible point, that is directly beside the existing meta names.

The extension is compatible with the TYPO3 version 6.2 LTS. Marketing Factory is making the extension available to the entire TYPO3 community and it can be downloaded here .

While extremely long and detailed page titles rapidly create a confusing sitemap at the TYPO3 backend, this kind of detailed page title can be advantageous at the frontend – particularly from an SEO perspective.

Marketing Factory developed the extension mfc_seotitle to enable both and thus offer the benefits of an informative SEO title and a clearly arranged backend. The extension enables an additional title for the output at the frontend (SEO title) to be added in addition to the normal page title. The extension also permits a navigation title to be added.

When developing the extension, particular attention was paid to ensuring that the SEO title can also be used for localisation purposes.

Marketing Factory is making the extension available to the entire TYPO3 community and it can be downloaded here .

The extension mfc_tagcloud enables a tag cloud to be integrated into any TYPO3 page.

Installation and configuration is extremely easy and convenient: the relevant keywords are entered at the TYPO3 backend and linked to the required page. Depending on the priority, the keywords can be displayed in five different sizes. What is more, it is possible to opt for normal or bold font.

In short, by using mfc_tagcloud users can navigate more easily around a website, as the operator directs users’ attention by emphasising certain keywords. Large, bold words stand out. It is up to the operator himself whether he wishes to use the tag cloud to highlight topics that are already popular or to push pages with rather less traffic.

Marketing Factory is making the extension mfc_tagcloud available to the entire TYPO3 community and it can be downloaded here.

The extension mfc_toprankedsites provides the operator of a website with the option to output the pages most frequently read or the most popular pages within a website.

Outputting these pages provides the added value that visitors can be navigated conveniently around the website in addition to the navigation bar and menu. The output can further increase traffic to these pages.

The extension mfc_toprankedsites analyses the traffic to the second level and/or to the second sub-directory and automatically outputs the most popular pages there. The number of pages outputted can be quickly and simply configured at the TYPO3 backend. The data relevant for generating the most popular pages is obtained from Google services, such as Google Analytics, which produce and output this by analysing the website traffic.

Marketing Factory has not made mfc_toprankedsites publicly available but we are happy to provide it at any time on request.