Page tree concepts

We are about to dive into all of the little details, but there are a few basic concepts that we need to review first. We've already talked about the page tree and levels a little in the Chapter 1, but we are going to be using these concepts a lot in this chapter. So, we're going to make sure we have a more complete definition that avoids any confusion:

• Page tree: Our TYPO3 page tree is all of the pages and folders that we work with. This includes the home page, about us, subpages, and even non-public items such as the storage folder in our example site. If we have a very simple website it could look like this:

  • Home

  • About Us

    • Staff

• Level: Our page tree will almost always have pages, subpages, and pages under those. In TYPO3, these are considered levels, and they increase as you go deeper into the page tree. For example, in our extremely simple website from the example above both Home and About Us are at the base (or root) of our page tree, so they are on level 0. The staff page is underneath the About Us page in the hierarchy, so it is on level 1. If we added a page for a photo gallery of our last staff lunch as a subpage to the staff page, then it would be at level 2:

  • Home (Level 0)

  • About Us (Level 0)

    • Staff (Level 1)

      • Staff Lunch Gallery (Level 2)

• Rootline: TYPO3 documentation actually has a few different uses for the term "rootline", but for the menu objects it is the list of pages from your current page or level moving up to the root page. In our example above, the current rootline from the Staff Lunch Gallery is Staff Lunch Gallery | Staff | About Us.