Live Ticker for TYPO3

Real-time updates on TYPO3 websites take more than a news plugin with auto-refresh

Sports clubs, news portals, local authorities on election night and conference organizers need a feature that the TYPO3 core does not offer: short chronological updates that appear on the page in real time, without the visitor having to reload. The liveticker extension solves this with a frontend plugin that loads new entries automatically via AJAX polling or WebSocket and inserts them at the top of the timeline. Editors type an update in the backend, click “Save”, and seconds later it is live on the website.

For organizations that cover live events on their website two or three times a year, the extension is a pragmatic solution. Anyone who live-blogs every day, however, should evaluate specialized platforms such as Tickaroo, which handle multimedia content, social media integration and multi-author workflows better.

Typical use cases are sporting events, local elections and conferences

The most common scenario is the sports live ticker. An amateur sports club covers its home games with a ticker on the club website. An editor on the sideline types goals, cards and substitutions into the TYPO3 backend, ideally via the mobile backend, and the entries appear on the page in chronological order. For a semi-professional football match with 500 to 2,000 concurrent visitors, the ticker has to run reliably without overloading the server.

The second scenario is election night for municipalities and county authorities. On election day, local governments publish interim results through a live ticker. The updates contain vote shares, projections and comments from election officials. The challenge: every visitor expects the same result at the same moment, which creates peak traffic.

The third scenario is conferences and members’ meetings. Associations and clubs cover their general meetings live so that members who cannot attend can follow the proceedings. The entries contain voting results, speeches and resolutions. For associations with 5,000 to 50,000 members who cannot all attend in person, a live ticker is the simplest form of digital participation, and it needs no video streaming infrastructure.

The technical architecture relies on TYPO3 records with AJAX polling in the frontend

The extension stores ticker entries as TYPO3 records in a dedicated table. Each entry contains a timestamp, text, an optional image and a category, for example “Goal”, “Yellow card” or “Result”. The records belong to a ticker container that is assigned to an event. An editor can run several tickers in parallel, for instance for different matches or events on the same day.

In the frontend, the plugin renders the existing entries as a chronological list (newest first) and starts a JavaScript timer that sends an AJAX request to a TYPO3 endpoint at configurable intervals, typically every 10 to 30 seconds. The endpoint returns all entries added since the last request, and the JavaScript inserts them at the top of the list with an animation.

Advanced implementations use WebSockets instead of polling, which cuts latency from 10 to 30 seconds to under 1 second. That, however, requires a WebSocket server (for example Node.js with Socket.io) running alongside the TYPO3 web server. For most club and municipal websites, this is overkill, and AJAX polling at a 15-second interval feels close enough to real time. A middle ground is Server-Sent Events (SSE), which use a persistent HTTP connection and are simpler to implement than WebSockets, but also need server-side support.

Common problems are server load at peak traffic, missing mobile input and caching conflicts

Problem one: server load at peak traffic. When 2,000 visitors each send an AJAX request every 15 seconds, that adds up to 8,000 requests per minute. Without a caching strategy, a regular shared hosting server collapses. The fix: put a reverse proxy such as Varnish or Cloudflare in front of the AJAX endpoint and cache the response for 5 seconds. That brings the actual hits on the application server down to 12 per minute instead of 8,000.

Problem two: mobile input for editors. The TYPO3 backend is only partly usable on mobile devices. An editor on the sideline, typing on a smartphone in the rain, needs a simplified input screen. The fix: a custom endpoint with a reduced form (text field, category dropdown, submit button) optimized for mobile browsers.

Problem three: caching conflicts with the TYPO3 page cache. If the page with the embedded ticker is served from the TYPO3 cache, visitors see outdated entries. The fix: exclude the ticker from the page cache (USER_INT), or better, cache the page and load only the ticker area via AJAX, which combines a cached page with dynamic content.

The extension was built for older TYPO3 versions, and custom solutions are more future-proof

liveticker has no official support for TYPO3 v12 or v13. Its core functionality, however, is small enough that rebuilding it as a custom plugin is often more economical than migrating the extension. Gosign builds live ticker functions as lean Extbase plugins with a JSON API endpoint that a simple JavaScript client in the frontend consumes. The effort for a basic implementation (backend input, frontend display, AJAX polling) is 3 to 5 working days.

The advantage of a custom solution: mobile input can be delivered as a progressive web app, which gives the editor on the sideline an input interface built for the job. In addition, a cache layer such as Redis or Cloudflare Workers can sit between the frontend and TYPO3 and keep server load at peak traffic to a minimum. This architecture scales to 10,000+ concurrent visitors without performance problems.