[Typo3] Newbie queries on image management and metadata

Fred Riley fred.riley at nottingham.ac.uk
Thu Aug 11 19:49:46 CEST 2005


Hi all

This is my first post to any Typo3 forum and I'm a complete newbie to the system, so please be gentle with me. 

On behalf of a UK Higher Education body  (http://www.rlo-cetl.ac.uk/) I've spent some days trying to find an Image Management System (IMS) for our technical developers, who are developing learning objects (examples of the type at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/nursing/sonet/rlos/rlolist.html and http://www.ucel.ac.uk/showroom/). These objects are usually mini-websites with illustrating graphics and animations (Director, Flash). The developers (of which I'm one) are based at the three different universities of the organisation, and there's a crying need for an image bank to which we can all contribute, and from which we can all draw images to use in these RLOs. 

When I posted a query about this to a UK list, a very kind person suggested using Typo3, which I'd not heard of before. I've spent a good few hours today looking at the two Typo3 sites and going through documentation, and it looks to me as if Typo3 not ony fulfils the specification I drew up for the IMS, but would be a very useful CMS to develop and maintain our website. Before I spend a serious amount of time installing and testing the system, though, I would be very grateful if folk in this community could help me with the following queries:

1. Does Typo3, or any of its extensions, support popular vector image formats? I'm thinking of AI, CDR, WMF, and SVG.
2. Does it support the Dublin Core metadata schema? The metadata fields in the Digital Asset Management extension look very DC-like.
3. Can you import thesauri and/or controlled vocabularies into Typo3 and use them for keywords and indexing? I'm thinking of something like MeSH (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html).
4. The guy who put me on to Typo3 said that one of its drawbacks was that the templates still used layout tables. Is this the case, or can we produce pure CSS layouts?
5. Our developers will need to be able to search the image collection by:

* keyword
* format (eg jpg, gif, png)
* file size
* image resolution
* image depositor (ie who uploaded the image)

Are any/all of these possible? I'm guessing that, as Typo3 is based on MySQL, that we'll be able to construct SQL queries and run them.

6. How portable are sites/archives created with Typo3? That is, if I were to set up a site on Windows server X, is it easy to port everything to Unix server Y or Mac server Z? I know you can port MySQL databases easily, but to preserve functionality we'd have to port all the scripts used.

Many thanks to anyone who's read this far, and more thanks in advance to anyone who has the patience to answer any of these queries. Although Typo3 does seem to be the best fit with our spec I do need to evaluate other dedicated IMSs, and I know from my Zope experience that it takes some days to properly evaluate a CMS, days which I don't want to spend if Typo3 can't do what we need it to do. I would like to use it, though, because all the other systems under consideration are proprietary and most definitely not Open Source.

I have read a good bit of TFM and extension docs, but there's so much FM to R that it's quite likely the answers to the above are in docs I've not had time to skim through, so apologies if this is the case.

Cheers

Fred



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