title: Overview page of elements from a Typo3 page tree
body: <p>I'm primarily a UI and graphic designer and, eventhough I have some experience with Typo3, I'm completely stuck at the following problem:</p>
  
  <p>I have a large page tree with single pages for items from a catalogue (one item per page), the layouts for these items are built with Armin Vieweg's beautiful <a href="http://typo3.org/extensions/repository/view/dce" rel="nofollow">"Dynamic Content Elements" extension (DCE)</a>.</p>
  
  <p>Now I want to create an overview page where I reference some of those items automatically - ideally I want to check a box in each element I want to display there (I would add a field <em>catalogueItemPreview</em> to the item DCE which authors can check or uncheck).</p>
  
  <p>Unfortunately, I have no concrete idea of how the database is structured and how I could build a query (where would I even do that? in a custom-made plugin?).</p>
  
  <p><strong>This is how I imagine it could work: On the overview page I use a plugin/an extension in a Content Element that does the following:</strong></p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>search Typo3 DB for content elements with a field called "catalogueItemPreview"</p></li>
  <li><p>return fields "<em>catalogueItemTitle</em>", "<em>catalogueItemShortDescription</em>", "<em>cataloguePreviewImage</em>"</p></li>
  <li><p>use a template to render previews of all those elements on the overview page</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>I'm happy for ANY pointers towards a solution as currently I'm completely in the dark about where even to begin ...</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/TetfUyC.png" rel="nofollow">Schematic screenshot from the Typo3 backend</a></p>