TYPO3 Hooks Tutorial (using the extension wfqbe)

So here’s a little tutorial on how to use hooks in TYPO3, I hope this is helpful, feel free to ask any questions. A little disclaimer: I have no “formal” education in this and I’m mostly a self-taught developer, so should I occasionally use the wrong terminology feel free to tell me .

Helpful knowledge: You should know the basics of extension building (creating a new extension with the kickstarter should suffice), if you haven’t worked with wfqbe so far you should get to know the extension first. wfqbe requires some basic SQL skills.

I’m using a hook to extend the extension wfqbe. wfqbe is a great and powerful tool to access MySQL databases via the TYPO3 Frontend and display and edit the content of database entries. As default wfqbe accesses the TYPO3 database, but you can also access pretty much any MySQL [edit: Mauro pointed out, that wfqbe will work with any database supported by ADOdb] database. It even comes with built-in AJAX capabilities (xajax) but I haven’t used that yet. If you haven’t started working with wfqbe you might want to work through the documentation of it. It’s fairly well documented. You will find yourself using the tool for all kinds of different purposes and it will spare you lots of work of having to write a new extension for everything as it is highly configurable through the use of TypoScript and: hooks.