Doodle Alternative for TYPO3

Scheduling polls belong on your own website, not on an external service

Doodle is convenient: send a link, participants pick their time slots, the date is set. But Doodle is a third-party provider: Doodle AG, based in Zurich, hosts on AWS in Germany and Ireland, but uses US service providers for some functions and runs tracking and advertising in the free tier. For GDPR-conscious companies, for public institutions and for any organization that does not want to pass user data on to external services, that is a problem. A Doodle alternative built directly into TYPO3 solves it: scheduling on your own infrastructure, without third-party cookies and without data leaving your systems.

The target group is clear: organizations that regularly coordinate dates with external participants (parent meetings, committee meetings, workshops, training sessions) and want to stay in control of the data.

Typical use cases

Schools coordinating parent meetings. Schools and daycare centers schedule parent meetings several times a year, with 30 families picking the best of 5 possible dates. With a TYPO3 plugin on the school website, the poll runs without mandatory accounts and without external services. The results stay on the school’s server. For a school authority with 12 schools and 6,000 families in total, the TYPO3 integration made its paid Doodle subscription entirely unnecessary.

Public authorities and institutions. Municipal administrations and regional authorities are often not permitted to use cloud services that process data outside the EU. A TYPO3-based scheduling tool meets public-sector IT policies, because the data stays on the organization’s own server or in the municipal data center.

Internal workshop planning. Cross-departmental workshops, strategy meetings or training sessions require scheduling with 10-50 participants. On a TYPO3-based intranet, the poll can be embedded directly, without sending out an external link that the corporate proxy might block.

Technical architecture

A Doodle alternative in TYPO3 is based on an Extbase plugin with three database tables: Polls, Options (the proposed dates) and Votes. The poll is placed as a content element on a TYPO3 page. Participants open the page, see the date options and select the time slots that work for them.

Data entry happens through a Fluid-based form. Each date option is shown as a row, and participants tick checkboxes (yes/no/maybe). Optionally, the participant’s name is requested. For authenticated users (frontend login), the extension can fill in the name automatically and prevent duplicate votes.

The results view shows a matrix: columns for participants, rows for date options, color-coded cells. The date with the most acceptances is highlighted. An admin view in the TYPO3 backend lists all polls with their results and lets you close or archive completed polls.

Email notifications can optionally be integrated: new poll created, new participant voted, poll closed. The emails use TYPO3’s mail API and can be customized via Fluid templates.

Data protection compliance comes from: automatic deletion of the poll data after a configurable period (e.g. 30 days after the poll closes), only a technically necessary session cookie for taking part in a poll, which needs no consent under the EU ePrivacy rules, and a privacy notice that states the purpose and the retention period. (US: There is no federal counterpart to the GDPR; state laws such as California’s CCPA/CPRA set their own requirements.)

Common problems and solutions

Spam votes. Without protection, bots or trolls can cast hundreds of fake votes. The fix: a honeypot field (an invisible form field that only bots fill in), rate limiting (no more than 3 votes per IP address per hour) and, optionally, a simple CAPTCHA. Making frontend login mandatory eliminates spam entirely, but limits usability for external participants.

No calendar integration. Participants want to add the agreed date straight to their calendar. Most TYPO3 Doodle alternatives offer no iCal export. The fix: once the poll closes, show a “Download event” button that generates an .ics file. Generating the iCal file takes about 2 hours of development time.

Mobile display of the poll matrix. A matrix with 10 date options and 20 participants is unreadable on a smartphone. The fix: on mobile devices, turn the matrix into a list view in which each date is shown individually with yes/no buttons. The results overview is likewise displayed as a vertical list instead of a horizontal table.

Migration and version compatibility

The TYPO3 Extension Repository contains several Doodle-like extensions with varying feature sets and maintenance status. None of them has become the standard. For TYPO3 v12 and v13, a custom development based on Extbase is therefore the better route: it covers exactly the features you need and remains maintainable in the long term.

The development effort for a basic version (create a poll, pick dates, show results) is 3-5 days. With email notifications, iCal export and an admin backend, it is 7-10 days. Compare that with a Doodle Team subscription for 15 users, which costs €2,520 a year with annual billing (€14 per seat per month, as of September 2026) and is due again every year.

For companies already using Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, the TYPO3 solution is primarily relevant for external participants. Internal scheduling runs more efficiently through Outlook or Google Calendar. The TYPO3 solution fills the gap where external participants need to take part without an account. Gosign develops such custom solutions based on Extbase and integrates them into existing TYPO3 installations.