Re: CMS Typo 3 (Slightly 0T(?))

Hi Ryan On Thursday 15 June 2006 12:48 pm, Ryan A wrote: > Am looking to start working with a CMS for a large > site, after comparing quite a few CMSs Typo3 comes out > looking very very attractive in features and price. > > Before I commit my time to using it I would like a > quick review from those of you who have used/use it, > as from the docs it says it has quite a steep learning > curve even for programmers (around a month, as stated > on typo3.org) > > How hard was it for you to learn it? > How useful has it been to you? > Support when you hit a programming wall? > Would you recommend it for a first CMS to me? Here's a copy of something I put together a while ago in response to a similar request. Typo3 is a hugely capable product and has been in production use here for over two years. We have almost 100 contributing content editors within the council and the system currently hosts over 4000 pages of information across our Internet and intranet sites. Whether it will suit you will depend on a number of things... 1. Because Typo3 is an "enterprise" level CMS it offers a lot of options in how you set it up manage editing permissions what publishing rules you want to enforce what workflows you want to set up what special facilities you want to enable how you will do user authentication how translation is handled what meta-data will be collected and so on. The setup can even support different procedures for various parts of the organisation. If your site will have large numbers of contributing editors and needs a sophisticated management system in order to support your business rules for publishing then Typo3 is certainly up to the job. But if there will be just a few people maintaining the site (or maybe just yourself) then there are probably large parts of Typo3 that you won't need and you may view it as too complex a system for this reason. 2. Typo3 is also a software development platform. If you want to use your CMS partly as a framework for web applications that link to databases generate emails or any other form of online transaction then we find that developing "plugins" for Typo3 is a lot faster than traditional web development. The CMS takes care of all the presentation user authentication session management etc and allows the web developer to focus on just providing the basic functionality. Typo3 is written in PHP so to exploit this you need to have (or be able to employ) developers who are experienced in using PHP. But this functionality may also be irrelevant for you. 3. Like most CMS systems Typo3 requires you to design templates to define presentation. Templating in Typo3 is very sophisticated and has its own script language (typoscript). You can use different templates at different parts of the page tree and even add rules to fine-tune a base template for individual pages. But developing a template is not a trivial task particularly if you want to ensure full compliance with W3C standards and also in our case Government metadata standards. This is another case where Typo3 may either offer just the capabilities you need or may be complete overkill. The people doing content editing generally aren't aware of any the above of course and once you have Typo3 set up the way you want then people providing content find it easy to use. We have put together our own one-day training course and we find that is all people need. Typo3 is popular with users. We have almost ten years experience using open source applications and we support the Typo3 application in-house. However we did initially engage a Typo3 consultancy to get their views on how we planned to set the system up what hardware to use and so on (addressing those issues raised in point 1 above). We also bought in some initial training from them to get our developers up to speed quickly. There are companies that can offer you a range of services including the complete setup of Typo3 to your requirements. The online support from Typo3 users is also good. The documentation on the site is comprehensive and you will usually get a very quick and helpful response to asking questions on the Typo3 mail lists (providing you've read the FAQs first!). I would have no hesitation about using an open source CMS providing you either have sufficient in-house technical resource to do day-to-day support or can set up a good relationship with a software company that can offer whatever additional support you think you need. -- Nick Talbott IT Policy and Planning Manager/Rheolwr Polisi a Chynllunio TGCh Powys County Council, UK web: www.powys.gov.uk