TYPO3 Extension friendlycaptcha_official

Our friendlycaptcha_official extension allows you to easily implement Friendly Captcha on a TYPO3 website - it doesn't matter if you are using Powermail or the official TYPO3 Form extension. 

What is captcha and why do we need it?

CAPTCHA is a mechanism whose job is to prevent spam or web scrapping. It should correctly recognize and distinguish between bots and humans. The script is usually based on a simple task, which humans can easily complete and most of the bots cannot. It is often used on websites with forms in order to stop scripts that automatically send promotions or registration requests in large quantities.

Friendly Captcha - Is it really friendly?

Do you remember distorted letters in the picture, that you need to type in the text field next to? Or you have to select all squares with ‘motorcycle’ in it? How many times have you failed because you mixed up the uppercase 'i' and lowercase 'L' or missed a square, and then had to repeat to solve captcha? Friendly Captcha is one of the solutions which makes it better, especially when it comes to user-friendliness. You only have to press the 'click here' button, or it will even be solved automatically when you start filling out the form. It can't be easier! 

The need of a CMS Extension

Almost every websites nowadays needs to have some sort of spam protection. More and more of our customers want us to implement CAPTCHA on their website or want us to replace old-fashioned solutions. Most of them choose Friendly Captcha, probably because of its ease of use and safety. That's why, we made the decision to create a plugin, which will allow us to integrate the service in an easy and quick way on every TYPO3 website. The requirements were simple: Simple, universal, easy to configure, working with the most used form extensions. Furthermore we wanted to support the TYPO3 LTS versions 11 & 12.

My first TYPO3 plugin

In theory, the task was simple, but not for me, the Junior Web Developer who started his career a few months earlier. It was a kind of interesting challenge. I had to learn how to create a TYPO3 extension, dive a little bit deeper in cms-core, get to know the API and the differences between the content management system's versions. Luckily, my colleague Georg Ringer, experienced backend developer and TYPO3 core team member, was by my side who answered every question and solved every problem I faced. In conclusion, I've learned a lot, I'm happy that the extension has been published on our GitHub account and other developers and companies can use it. I'm really satisfied with the result and my first TYPO3 Plugin in general.

How to get the extension?

Visit our integration page and our official repository on GitHub for more information.