Club List for TYPO3

Municipalities and umbrella organizations need a structured club database, not static lists

Anyone looking for the local chess club on a town website or a regional sports federation’s portal expects a search filter, not a 15-page PDF list. That’s exactly the problem hwvereinsliste solves: the extension stores clubs as TYPO3 records and makes them accessible through category filters, full-text search and detail views. For municipal websites, umbrella organizations and district sports federations, the plugin has been a proven tool for years, and it lets editorial teams maintain the data without any developer involvement.

In many German municipalities, the reality is that club directories still circulate as Word documents among department heads. hwvereinsliste replaces this workflow with a central database in the TYPO3 backend that feeds the frontend plugins. Residents find their club in seconds, and editors update contact details without needing FTP access.

Typical use cases range from municipal portals to sports federation databases

The most common scenario is the classic club list on a municipal website. A municipality with 80 to 120 registered clubs maintains all entries centrally in the TYPO3 backend. Residents filter in the frontend by categories such as sports, culture, social services or youth. The detail view shows contact persons, training times and contact details. The municipality’s web team updates entries on its own, without technical help.

The second scenario involves umbrella organizations and district sports federations. A German state sports federation often manages 500 to 2,000 member clubs across dozens of sports. Here, filtering becomes the core feature: users combine sport, location and age group to find the right club in their neighborhood. hwvereinsliste supports this kind of multi-criteria filtering natively.

A third scenario is directory portals in the volunteering sector. Volunteer centers use the extension to list organizations that are looking for volunteers. Categorization runs through TYPO3 system categories, which allows overlaps with other content elements on the same page. In some cases, the extension also serves as a business directory for local economic development, listing companies instead of clubs.

Technical architecture built on Extbase records and Fluid templates

hwvereinsliste uses TYPO3’s Extbase/Fluid framework. Clubs are stored as domain records in a dedicated table. Each record contains fields for name, description, address, contact details, website URL, logo and categories. Categorization uses TYPO3 system categories, which simplifies integration with other extensions.

Two plugins are available in the frontend: a list view with filter and search functions, and a detail view for individual clubs. The templates are Fluid-based and can be overridden via TypoScript paths or a sitepackage. To adapt the layout, you copy the Fluid templates into your own package and adjust the HTML structure and CSS classes, without modifying the extension itself.

By default, filtering runs on the client side for small data sets and on the server side for larger ones. For installations with more than 500 clubs, we recommend combining it with a search index solution such as ke_search to speed up full-text search.

One aspect that municipal projects often overlook is accessibility. Under the EU Web Accessibility Directive, public sector bodies have to make their websites accessible. That includes the club list: filter elements must be operable by keyboard, result lists need ARIA labels, and the search function has to work with screen readers. The extension’s default templates don’t fully meet these requirements and need to be adapted.

Common problems involve data import, categorization and responsive display

The most common problem during initial setup is the data import. Municipalities typically keep their club data in Excel lists with inconsistent formats. Column names vary, categories are maintained as free text rather than as a standardized taxonomy, and the contact details include outdated entries. Gosign solves this with an AI-assisted import workflow: the Excel file is analyzed automatically, columns are mapped, categories normalized and duplicates detected. What used to take half a day of manual cleanup now runs in under an hour.

The second problem concerns the category structure. If categories aren’t clearly defined up front, redundancies creep in, such as “Soccer”, “Football club” and “Football (soccer)” as three separate entries. We recommend defining a category taxonomy with no more than 15 to 20 top-level categories before go-live and creating them as system categories in the TYPO3 backend.

The third problem is the responsive display of the list view. On mobile devices, a table layout quickly becomes cluttered. For mobile viewports, the Fluid templates should render cards instead of a table, which a simple template adjustment in the sitepackage takes care of. Gosign ships responsive templates for club lists as standard: a card grid on smartphones and a table on desktops.

Migrating to v12 requires Extbase adjustments, v13 is not yet officially supported

hwvereinsliste was developed primarily for TYPO3 v9 and v10. TYPO3 v12 requires changes to the Extbase persistence layer, because the query interface has changed. Specifically, this affects the repository classes and the TypoScript-based persistence configuration, which since v10 is handled through Classes.php. The template paths stay in TypoScript; site sets, which can bundle them, only exist from TYPO3 v13 on, and even there they are optional.

There is currently no official support for TYPO3 v13 from the extension’s author. If you are moving to v13, you either have to adapt the extension yourself or evaluate an alternative. In such cases, Gosign checks whether migrating the extension or rebuilding it on Extbase with the current API is more cost-effective. For small club databases with fewer than 200 entries, a custom plugin is often the better choice, because it is tailored exactly to the municipality’s requirements and carries no legacy dependencies.