News Sync for TYPO3

Copy and paste stops working once news has to appear on several TYPO3 instances

Organizations with multiple websites face a very concrete problem. An umbrella association publishes a press release, and 15 regional associations are supposed to show it on their own TYPO3 installations. Or a corporate group runs a corporate website and five brand websites, and certain news items need to appear on all six. Copying by hand is error-prone and time-consuming, and it creates inconsistencies. newssync solves the problem by synchronizing news articles automatically between TYPO3 instances or from external sources. RSS import, API-based sync and duplicate detection are its core functions.

For organizations with a multi-site strategy, content syndication is not a nice-to-have but an operational necessity. Without automated sync, content silos grow that the central editorial team cannot control.

Typical use cases are association networks, corporate websites and news aggregation

The most common scenario is the association network. A national federation publishes industry news, regulatory updates and press releases on its TYPO3 website. Its 16 regional associations run their own TYPO3 installations and want to republish selected articles automatically. newssync imports the flagged articles via RSS feed or API, creates local tx_news records and lets the regional associations adapt teasers and categories locally.

The second scenario is a corporate website with a content hub strategy. Group headquarters maintains a news hub from which brand and country websites pull content selectively. Synchronization is category-based: a brand website subscribes only to articles in the categories “Product X” and “Innovation”, not to the entire news feed.

The third scenario is news aggregation from external sources. An industry portal automatically imports press releases from member companies via their RSS feeds. newssync checks the feeds at configurable intervals, imports new articles and detects duplicates based on title and publication date.

The technical architecture relies on RSS parsing and the TYPO3 scheduler pipeline

newssync works with two import modes: RSS/Atom feed import and API-based sync. In RSS mode, the administrator configures a feed URL, and the scheduler task parses the feed, extracts title, teaser, body text, date and media URLs and creates tx_news records in the local database. Images are downloaded and stored locally as FAL files, so the source does not have to stay reachable.

In API mode, newssync communicates with a REST endpoint on the source instance. This allows a more selective import: instead of pulling in the entire feed, articles can be filtered by category, tag or date. API mode also transfers custom fields that the RSS format cannot represent.

Duplicate detection is based on a configurable key, by default a hash of title and publication date. If an article with the same key already exists, it is skipped or updated, depending on the configuration. This prevents the same article from being imported several times when the sync job runs more often than the feed is updated.

The sync runs as a TYPO3 scheduler task, typically every 15 to 60 minutes. Each run is logged with the number of imported, updated and skipped articles. When something goes wrong (feed unreachable, parser error), a warning is written to the TYPO3 log.

Common problems are media import, HTML cleanup and category mapping

Problem one: the media import fails. Images and documents referenced in the source feed are not always directly downloadable. Hotlink protection, authentication or CDN-based URLs can block the download. The fix: test media URLs before the import and implement a fallback that replaces missing images with a placeholder.

Problem two: messy HTML in the imported content. RSS feeds often contain HTML that does not meet the standards of the target system: inline styles, outdated tags, missing paragraphs. The fix: HTML sanitizing after the import, which strips superfluous tags and styles and brings the content into the expected format. TYPO3 provides the RteHtmlParser class for this.

Problem three: category mapping between source and target system. The categories in the source feed do not match the local categories. What headquarters calls “Press release” is labeled “Press” at the regional association. The fix: a mapping table in the newssync configuration that maps source categories to local TYPO3 sys_category records.

A fourth problem concerns content ownership. If a regional association edits a synchronized article locally and headquarters also updates the original, the next sync overwrites the local change. The fix: mark synchronized articles as read-only and allow local adjustments only in dedicated fields (for example a local teaser or a regional addendum) that the sync does not touch.

The extension has no confirmed v12 support, so custom solutions are more robust

newssync was developed for older TYPO3 versions and has no official support for v12 or v13. For organizations that need content syndication as a core function, Gosign recommends a tailor-made solution: a custom importer running as a scheduler task that consumes RSS feeds or a REST API and creates tx_news records. A basic implementation with feed import, duplicate detection and media download takes 3 to 5 working days. AI-assisted code generation considerably speeds up the development of the feed parser and the mapping layer.

The advantage of a custom solution is that the mapping between source and target categories, the media processing and the error handling can be tailored exactly to the organization’s requirements. A national federation with 16 regional associations has different sync requirements from a corporate group with 5 brand websites. Gosign builds content syndication solutions on modern TYPO3 APIs (PSR-14 events, Symfony Messenger for queue-based processing) that stay compatible through v13 upgrades.