[Typo3] Helping new users - was [menu item image gets cut off or truncated]

[Vincent]

Hi Alex.
Thanks for your reply.

On Fri, Oct 21, 2005 at 04:17:59AM -0500, Alex Heizer wrote:
> Hi Vincent,
> 
> Vincent wrote:
> 
> >When it does not appear that the community is willing to spend 2 or
> >3 minutes to save a newbie days, it makes one concerned that they are
> >going to be ignored and completely on their own if they choose typo3 and
> >have a show stopping problem that they cannot solve on their own.
> >
> I agree. That's why I stopped asking questions on the mailing list about 
> 2 years ago...

Good point.  And with everybody claiming that typo3 has one of the
biggest learning curves, taking weeks or even months to become
productive, I think weak community support will scare most new users
off.  It almost did even me because I have been researching cms systems
to save us time in managing our sites, not cost us time, and I am
a professional programmer and unix/network administrator.  I can barely
imagine how intimidating it must be to regular users.

Although, I will point out that the structure of typo3 (separate front
end and backend, and the document tree structure) seemed much more
intuitive to me than other CMS's (even from the very beginning) that
they say are easier to learn.  I briefly played around with Drupal,
which seems to be one of the post popular ones and it seemed more
confusing not having a separate backend to manage content.  Especially
when you do something like remove the login from the front page.

What's interesting about it is that just about everything I have learned
so far in typo3 seems so simple and logical and well designed once
I understand it.  I think with better community support and better new
user startup documentation, typo3 could have a shorter learning curve,
to get to the point of being productive, than many of the other even
more simple cms's.

Two of the main reasons we decided to put the most extensive evaluation
into typo3 are:

1. We do not want a cms that we are going to outgrow as our planned
   business web sites become more complex, causing us to have to choose
   a more powerful solution and start all over again down the road.
2. For business sites, we feel that SSL login ability is a basic
   necessity.  On cmsmatrix.org, almost all the other free OS CMS's are
   listed as NOT having this basic feature, except for Typo3 and Xaraya.
   Again I did not this feature from the feature lists or anywhere else
   on the typo3 site as I should have.  It had to come from a third
   party.


> >Another example of why new users are not as attracted to typo3 (speaking
> >for myself initially).
> >
> >I look at at other cms sites and most of them have links to themes and
> >templates to help new users get started more easily.  One of the cms
> >packages I recently evaluated, Xaraya, is even having a theme
> >competition to build up their collection of themes that they can offer
> >their users.  Typo3, so far as I can tell, is the most powerful cms of
> >all of them for creating themes, yet there are no links to any kind of
> >a theme page with screen shots that I have found on the typo3 site.  I am
> >surprised by this considering how much longer typo3 has been around.
> >  
> >
> If you mean interface themes for the backend, there are a few cool 
> skins, and there is a script that can convert a Linux/KDE icon set into 
> a T3 theme. 

That's cool and good to know.  But, no, I am talking about the front
end.  Until I am advanced enough get our web sites running under typo3,
backend customization is not a concern.  First of all, all the tutorials
I have read and videos I have watched so far teach using the standard
backend.  So I don't want to create more confusion there.


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