Welcome

You are here because the following people (in alphabetical order), and the Contao Community as a whole, were up day and night in order to further the development of Contao:

In addition to the core team, many more contributors make sure that Contao remains a unique and beautiful experience. We welcome anyone who wants to be a part of this!

This manual was created with support & funding of the Contao Association and the with support from the Contao Community and is managed by the following people (in alphabetical order):

Have fun browsing through the manual.

The search function of the documentation

You can search the documentation here, but you can also use it directly in your favorite browser. For this you have to register the documentation as an additional search engine in your browser.

Browser Firefox
  • Call up this page
  • Via “Actions for this page” (symbol with three dots) select “Add search engine”.
  • In “Settings/Search”, enter an abbreviation: e.g. @doc.
  • Restart the browser and search in the address bar for e.g.:
  • @docs inserttags

For newer versions:

  • Go to this page
  • Right click in the address bar
  • In the context menu that opens, last line: Add "Search Contao manual".
  • In the address bar, search for e.g.: inserttags
  • Below the address bar, a menu will open where you can also find the Contao icon at the bottom of the page, under Search once with:.
  • Click on the Contao icon and a tag will be added to the left of the search term: Contao manual
Browser Chrome
  • Set in “Settings/Search engine/Other search engine/Add”.
  • The following information:
  • Search engine: https://docs.contao.org/manual/
  • Search abbreviation: e.g. docs (any)
  • URL with %s instead of the search query: https://docs.contao.org/manual/de/?search=%s
  • Restart the browser and search by typing e.g.:
  • docs inserttags

This manual is divided into the following chapters:

  • Contao at a glance

    Contao is a web content management system published under an Open Source license, namely the Lesser General Public License.

  • Installation

    This will teach you anything you need to know in order to install and maintain Contao.

  • Update and Migration

    Update and migration of a Contao installation to a higher major version.

  • Administration area

    In the administration area, the so-called back end, you can do all the work related to the administration of your website.

  • System

    This chapter explains the System section in the Contao back end. It also contains some general articles relevant to the Contao system, like the debug mode.

  • Account Manager

    The account manager is a separate category in the back end navigation and contains four modules, which can be used to manage the back end users and front end members and their respective groups.

  • Layout

    The Layout navigation pane.

  • Site structure

    To use Contao effectively, it is important that you understand the basic principles and the structure of the system.

  • Article management

    Contao encapsulates static content in articles that are assigned to a specific page and layout area in the article management.

  • Core Extensions

    The following extensions are included with Contao: News, events, FAQ, newsletter, comments and listings.

  • Form Generator

    The Contao form generator helps you create forms by abstracting both the process of code generation and the complexity of validating the user input.

  • File Manager

    With the File Manager you can manage files and folders on your server and transfer files from your local computer to the server.

  • Performance

    Here you can find information about the high-performance operation of Contao.

  • Questions and answers

    Answers to the most frequently asked questions

  • Command line

    Contao provides various commands that you can use to manage your application

  • Guides

    Here you will find guides for various tasks.

  • Extensions

    Contao's functionality can be extended by installing certain packages.

  • Contribute to the documentation

    Learn how you can contribute to the documentation here.

Note

The English version of the manual is still a work in progress.