[TYPO3] Big application with T3?

[Neil Bertram]

> Do you think, it is a good idea to go in this direction?  Are there 
> any drawbacks I will have to face?
> 
> Do you know of any other "real applications" based on Typo3?

We've written one large application (a real estate management system and 
public marketplace) based on typo3, and I personally found it less than 
ideal. I ended up implementing the PEAR DB_DataObject library for ORM in 
such a way that it integrates slightly with TCA, then based a whole lot 
of AJAX stuff around it.

The main issue I found was that TYPO3's database normalisation is 
shocking (as is mentioned on this list all the time) and forces you into 
the csv mindset after a while. I think this negatively affected the project.

In the end the project went way over budget and time simply because we 
spent so much time tweaking typoscript to render elements correctly, and 
because the T3 API isn't the best for creating large-scale OO apps.

In hindsight I wouldn't try it again, I'd use Java or one of the PHP RAD 
frameworks (Zend, CakePHP, etc), or maybe even rails.

It would be nice if TYPO3 updated its API to be properly OO, instead of 
using classes as namespaces. The whole thing is a complete shambles to 
learn and work with. I've been working with typo3 for almost two years 
now, so I'm not new to it by any means. I can't wait until everything 
goes PHP5 and proper, and starts to resemble Java-like OO instead of 
traditional PHP style.

In short, TYPO3 is a great CMS and improving all the time, but don't use 
it as an application framework. It's too heavyweight, too hard to learn, 
and too restrictive to fill that gap at the moment.


Neil