[TYPO3] TYPO3's Capabilities (mainly regarding users, groups & permissions)

Ben Schreiner schreiner at internode.on.net
Tue Jan 17 08:40:18 CET 2006


I'm the IT Coordinator for a ~10,000 member Australia-wide
NFP organisation, and I need to select a CMS from all
available (open-source/commercial/custom-built).

I will probably be selecting an open-source or commerical
CMS that has the closest fit for our goals, and then finding
a developer to fill in the gaps. If we use Typo3 we will
contribute to the community by (where possible) giving back
any extensions we made/had made to satisfy our requirements.
===

QUESTION:

I'm considering Typo3, and I need to know how well it will
fit our requirements without any additional developement,
and a rough estimate of how difficult it will be to add the
features we need.

If Typo3 would require heavy modification, is there any
other system that would complement Typo3 to give the
functionality we require, or is there another standalone
system that you would recommend?

If you have implemented a similar system I'd be keen to know
which combination of extensions you used, and what (if any)
proprietary systems you needed added.
===

CMS REQUIREMENTS:
---

Accounts/Groups Requirements:

The main requirement is a sophisticted method of managing
accounts, where users can be in one or more groups and
groups can be members of one or more major_groups, and each
user, group and major_group can have a wide array of
permissions set. I also need to be able to set (and modify)
the precedence by which permissions are applied.

I need to be able to set the following per user, per group
and per major_group:
* access to specific areas within the site.
* access to specific sub areas, within each area.
* restrictions in each sub area (eg, reading/posting in
certain forums)
* items available from the online shop
* in addition to regular user permissions, I need to be able
to set multiple levels of administrative and moderator
rights in different areas, and I want to be able to delegate
all permisions (including the right to delgate certain
permissions).

Users need to be able to update parts of their own account,
eg. contact details etc.

Users should not have to create more than one account for
anything, The same account should allow them access, and
identify them when they post to a forum, or try to subsrcibe
to a discussion list.

Users need to be able to set secondary email addresses that
they can use to receive notifications, or that they can
subscribe to mailing lists with. They need to be able to see
a list of (their own) email addresses and which services
they are subscribed to. If an email address is changed, it
should only require one verification email from the
system(not one for discussuin lists, one for forums, etc.)
---

Content & Services Requirements:

Member only:
*Forums
*Email Discussion Lists (does Typo 3 integrate with
Mailman?)

Members & Public:
*Webpages
*Files (eg. PDFs)
*Gallery
*Online shop (linked with the members account (eg. for
billing address), I do not need accounts for the public)

The members area will have a major area that all members
will have access to (but I still need to be able to set a
wide variety of access levels within this area).

There will also be several sub-sites for various member
groups. The idea being that a part of the main site can be
used where appropriate, and where the groups have extended
requirements they will use a sub-site (but still have the
same account). The subsites would be almost equivalent to a
separate site, except they would not require their own shop,
or any public access. The subsites would still be under
control of the site administrator, and they would access the
main database to determine permissions etc.
---

Security/Stability:

The database will be storing personal data (postal
addresses, billing addresses, phone numbers etc.) and must
be at least as secure as any alternative. The database needs
to be protected from access by unauthorised members, just as
much as it needs protection from anonymous attackers.
---

Administrative/Reporting:

* Daily automatic backups of the site, with minimal downtime
during backups.

* Capability to move the site to another host, without
recreating all accounts and preferrably without recreating
all permissions.

* I need to be able to regularly extract a list of names and
addresses for printing mailing labels, or mail-merging.

---

Hosting:

(I'm including this, incase it restricts the use of any
extensions.)

I would prefer a system that doesn't require a (virtual)
dedicated server. If one is absolutely required, we only
have the budget for a virtual server.

Our present host has:
Apache 1.3.34 (Unix)
PERL 5.8.7
PHP 4.4.1
MySQL version 	4.0.25-standard
Mailman 2.1.6

Fantastico gives me the option to install TYPO3 3.8.0
---

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Ben Schreiner



More information about the TYPO3-english mailing list