Timetable for TYPO3

Schools publish timetables as PDFs, even though a digital solution would save everyone time

Most schools build their timetable in scheduling software such as Untis, export it as a PDF and upload it to the website. Parents, students and teachers then scroll through an unreadable table that does not scale on a smartphone. Every change (a substitute teacher, a room swap, a canceled lesson) means uploading a new PDF. The TYPO3 stundenplan extension (the key is German for “timetable”) replaces this workflow with a digital view directly on the website: day and week views, filters by subject, teacher and class, responsive display on every device and a printable version for the staff room.

For school districts, trusts and local authorities that run their school websites centrally on TYPO3, this is a solution that scales to ten, twenty or fifty schools at once.

Use cases range from a single primary school to a network of schools

The basic scenario is a single school with 20 classes, 40 teachers and a timetable that changes every week. The school office maintains the timetable in the TYPO3 backend or imports it from Untis. On the website, parents see the weekly view for their child’s class. The filter narrows the view down to one class, one subject or one teacher. Substitutions appear as color-coded changes, so parents can tell at a glance in the morning whether lessons are running as planned.

A second scenario covers school networks and school authorities with a central TYPO3 installation. A city runs 15 school websites on a multi-site TYPO3 instance. Each school has its own timetables, but the presentation is uniform. The extension is configured once and rolled out to all school sites through TypoScript inheritance. New schools are set up with the same configuration.

Third scenario: adult education centers and continuing education providers. An adult education center offers 200 courses per semester. The timetable shows which course takes place on which weekday and in which room. Participants filter by subject area (languages, IT, health) and see their personal weekly view. Combined with a login, registered participants see only the courses they have booked.

Under the hood, timetable data is stored as structured records

The extension defines several tables: classes, teachers, subjects, rooms and lessons. Each lesson is a record linked to a class, a teacher, a subject, a room, a weekday and a time slot. The data is either maintained manually in the backend or imported from timetabling software via CSV or XML.

The frontend plugin renders the data as an HTML table built on a weekday by time slot matrix. Filters (class, teacher, subject) are passed as GET parameters and processed on the server. The table is responsive through CSS: on desktop it shows the full week, on mobile devices it switches to a day view or becomes horizontally scrollable.

The print view produces an optimized layout without navigation and footer, with page breaks between the weekdays. A print stylesheet optimizes the table for landscape A4.

For imports from Untis, community solutions exist that parse the Untis XML export and write it into the TYPO3 database structure. The import can run as a Scheduler task, so changes made in Untis appear on the website automatically.

The recurring problems are data maintenance and the mobile view

The biggest problem is ongoing data maintenance. Timetables change weekly, substitutions daily. If the data is maintained by hand in the TYPO3 backend, the workload for 20 classes with 30 lessons per week each is considerable. The fix: set up an automated import from the scheduling software. Without that import, the extension is only practical for small institutions with a handful of classes.

Second problem: the mobile view. A timetable with five columns (Monday to Friday) and ten rows (periods) does not fit on a smartphone screen 375 pixels wide. Horizontal scrolling is the pragmatic answer, but parents find it unintuitive. A better approach: switch automatically to the day view on mobile viewports (showing only the current day), with swipe gestures to move between days.

Third issue: data protection. Showing teachers by name in a public timetable can raise GDPR issues, because their names are personal data. Some schools therefore show only subject and class, not the teacher’s name. The extension should let you configure which fields appear in the frontend.

The extension is a niche solution without active community maintenance

Timetable extensions for TYPO3 are niche products with a small community. Recent versions are compatible with TYPO3 v12, but active development for v13 is not guaranteed. Schools and school authorities planning for the long term should assess whether a custom build on standard TYPO3 building blocks (Extbase records plus Fluid templates) would be more sustainable than a community extension with an uncertain maintenance horizon. Gosign advises schools, education providers and school authorities on the choice between a community extension, custom development and dedicated timetable SaaS solutions connected to TYPO3.