[Typo3] TYPO3 vs Plone

[Simon]

A couple of people have noticed that I've used both Plone and TYPO3. 
I've been meaning to write something for a while about my experiences 
and now a message over on the t.dev has reminded me.

I'm not sure I the right person to analyse this. I'm not a professional 
web developer and really can't comment much on the deeper aspects of OO 
development, application frameworks, PHP vs Python, etc

However, a couple of years back I was looking for an Open Source CMS. I 
looked at a lot of products including TYPO3. In the end the vague 
criteria that I used to make the decision was probably along the lines of:
1 How easy was it to install?
2 What did it look like?

Setting up Plone on a Windows machine was easier than Typo3. A single 
installer could install everything needed and give you a dummy website. 
Typo3 needed more configuration and things like ImageMagick needed to be 
installed separately. The configuration of TYPO3 seemed more daunting!

As for what it looked like. Typo3 is very intimidating at first view - 
lots and lots of small buttons. The Zope/Plone interface is probably a 
bit friendlier at first sight.

The major influencer was one of instant gratification. With Plone all I 
needed to do was to change the logo in the design and I had an instant 
website that looked reasonably professional (how many Plone based site 
have we seem like that). From there I could simply start tweaking CSS to 
modify the site to look less Plone-like.

Typo3 came with a not so nice (in my opinion) football site based on 
framesets. To get beyond that position one had to start learning about 
TypoScript, etc. Even now with TemplaVoila one has to do quite a lot of 
work to get to a workable site.

In fact I think that is probably the single most important point that I 
could make is that TYPO3 should come with a high quality XHTML based 
template out of the box that is easily customizable through CSS.

The main reason for my coming back to TYPO3 and trying again is that I 
really wanted a product based upon PHP and MySQL as that was what I was 
most comfortable with. I’m still getting my head around it but my first 
TYPO3 website has come out OK so far – http://www.ccsit.co.za

I doubt I will look back from this point on. I am busy working on my 
first extension for TYPO3 and am enjoying the community and high quality 
of documentation (I'd love some detailed extension/kickstart 
documentation though.

Cheers,
Simon