[TYPO3] No tutorials?

[Christopher]

Hi,

On 10/3/06, virgil huston <virgil.huston at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey Joey,
>
> TYPO3 should be mainstream for lots of reasons. Mainstream meaning the
> market leader in its niche. Quark is a market leader, for example, with the
> market it is intended for. TYPO3 is better for everyone, especially
> developers and implementors.

Even though I don't want to get sucked into another of these debates,
here I am...

TYPO3 arguably IS a 'mainstream' tool /for developers/ already. Tens
of thousands of installations, including many medium large companies
and public institutions along with countless smaller sites is very
significant IMO.

I would say that the problem has much more to do with the fact that
many end-users who can, for example, get a site up and running in
Drupal in 40 minutes think of TYPO3 as something similar in /kind/ to
Drupal etc--which it decidedly is NOT.

/Every/ other GPL CMS I have experimented with has many, many more
opinions about what a website should look like and how it should be
organized than TYPO3. For a certain market--i.e. those users who are
not necessarily willing or able to make such decisions, or those who
just don't need to--this is a good thing. It means that someone can
get a fairly generic website up and running very quickly.

Similarly for those users who I have always felt are TYPO3's natural
market--website developers and development agencies--the fact of
TYPO3's lack of opinions is a /very/ good thing indeed. It takes me
far less time to build a much more customized site in TYPO3 than I can
do in e.g. Drupal simply because Drupal will /always/ have /some/
opinion that contradicts the needs of the project at hand which means
I have to un-customize it to suit my needs (by the way: this is no
abuse of Drupal which is a fairly good product in its way, I just
point out a difference of approach between the two CMSs that I think
is relevant here).

More than anything, this seems like a problem for the T3 Association
to handle; is TYPO3 supposed to be a tool usable by end-users with
relatively little tech background? If so, then yes, there *are*
serious problems with documentation etc. For a constituency like that,
TYPO3's documentation is much too difficult and the default settings
in various packages are too generic.

On the other hand, if TYPO3 is supposed to be a tool for
web-developers (i.e. a group with a better than average grasp of web
technologies in general), then the documentation we have, while being
somewhat disorganized and occasionally too dated, is on the whole
quite good.

Obviously there is a middle ground between these extremes as well, but
again, this is probably a place where the Association needs to provide
guidance.


-Christopher