Overview 

The CHF consists of a set of interoperable extensions for the enterprise content management system TYPO3, which provides management of content, users, and files, a toolset to publish pages and content blocks, a thriving community, and an extension API. On top of these features, and using the same open-source licence, the CHF provides a set of modular components that you can orchestrate by adding your own so-called ‘sitepackage’: a small extension specific to your individual project that you may simply copy and adapt from a boilerplate included in the CHF. This process may be as simple as listing the components you need and using everything else out of the box, or you could radically overwrite layout and data templates, add database tables and rows, or integrate other extensions available in the TYPO3 extension repository.

The original idea for a CHF was presented in 2017 by Torsten Schrade, with a number of ideas implemented across several projects of the Digital Academy ahead of and after the presentation. Work on version 2 of the CHF began in 2023 in the form of a complete rewrite organised by Jonatan Jalle Steller - with the exception of LOD, which had been in development much earlier. The rewrite with a new set of components and a different set of features was needed to better adapt to various use cases and to provide a coherent whole. Work on version 2 of the CHF was accomplished as part of two projects financed by the German Academies Programme: the Digital Dictionary of Surnames in Germany and the Corpus Vitrearum Germany.