I have recently had the opportunity to work with Typo3. I needed to write the contents of an entire homepage. And I have been forced to question: what makes the success of this CMS?
It’s not intuitive. Contrary to what people might say, if you want to edit content, you need a few clicks more than necessary, you never see what you are actually editing. If you have special features like teasers and so on, you’ll have a hard time to find what you’ve just changed.
It’s complicated. Typo3 is clearly not by programmers for people but for programmers for programmers. If you understand how a website works, you may find out, what all this you have on your screen means, but if not, well, you have simply no idea. I’ve been training CMS to clients for about ten years now, and I surely don’t want to train Typo3 to anyone.
It is true that Typo3 is free. And you will be able to host Typo3 at very low rates. But most clients will be glad to settle for a slightly higher hosting bill if they can have a CMS they can actually work with. And for the cost of the product: there are lots of open source CMS which are free as well. I recommend you go with Magnolia – it’s simple, it’s free, it’s stable and you can train it within an hour.
I guess the success that Typo3 clearly has comes from the fact, that it is one of the largest in the world. And that it has been there for so long. But that may be a disadvantage as well. Because by now, there has been a lot of progress in terms of usability. And Typo3 just does not seem to have kept the pace.
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Hi – thanks for this informative posting. Please pardon this, my English is not the best. French is my first language but I am working on getting down English. See you later!
You made some good points there. I did a search on the topic and found most people will agree with your blog.
One of the main problems TYPO3 has is poor site implementation. It is something the TYPO3 community is battling every day. Because it is an advanced CMS out of the box TYPO3 is a complex. A properly setup TYPO3 implementation should strip away complexity and only present editors with the functions and pages they need to see. It can and should be simple.
That said I have used many systems and TYPO3 is simply the best . . . if properly setup.