[TYPO3-english] is TYPO3 for me

[Gour]

Hello!

in short: I'm looking for a stable & mature CMS with large-enough
community on which I can settle for longer-term offering everything for
my web needs (smaller-medium sites) having enough
extensions/add-ons/plugins enabling me to use them as 'lego-bricks' and
integrate everything together without the need to go too deep under the
hood, so wondering is TYPO3 is right choice for me?

long: In the past I did use CMS Made Simple and did few sites with it,
but left due to too arrogant devs not caring much for their users.
Afterwards tried Joomla, but quickly uninstalled it.

When MODx Revo appeared, I did try it and played with it for some time
but left seeing it was not clear where is was going.

Then tried tinkering with Django, mostly with Django-CMS, but the
project had problems with compatibilities between dependencies for
different 'reusable apps'.

Then used SilverStripe (2.4.x), but it felt too rudimentary and
'discovered' Concrete5 which is at the moment used for the non-profit
organization I'm creating content for.

For my private site i use(d) WP which is simple blog-only, but we want
to expand it into bigger site documenting our upcoming open-source
multi-platform desktop project.

Considering that we'd do our desktop project in Python and in order to
not 'change gears' too often, I did evaluate web2py which we like as
the framework, but there is not the single mature CMS written in it -
there are 2 altogether which are mostly one-man-show without any
community around it.

That led us back to Django where we find: Django-CMS, Mezzanine and
FeinCMS, but all of them are not so big projects in terms of number of
devs & community and lack all the 'bricks' we'd need to migrate our
sites to them which means learning a framework.

Finally, we have to put asap web site for our small company site and
invested some $s in buying add-ons for Concrete5, but we really do not
like their business model - plenty of add-ons which are mostly sold.

Moreover, docs for their framework is a need of some love and the core
team is also no too big.

Finally, somehow, I have 'discovered' TYPO3 and, of course, could read
many 'hate' stories on the Net (there is even anti-TYPO3 list) where
several users complain how TYPO3 is complex, unintuitive, not many
usable extensions etc.

I did install it on my server, and I must say that it looks quite good.

I mentioned my (present) web needs above, but in terms of functionality
it boils down to:

a) decent blog engine with comments, support for Disqus, possibly
pingback/trackback which would be use on all the three sites (private,
non-profit, company)

b) extensions for google-maps front-end, Piwik support...

c) extension to handle public download area counting number of downloads
for media files (audio, video) 

d) extension for document management to provide private downloadable
area for our (registered) clients, so that each client can access
his/her private support docs/multimedia-files etc. (to be used on
company site)

e) simple shop so that customers can offer our 'products' which are
actually just homeopathy & counselling services - nothing complicated
since there are not thousands products to be handled.

Moreover, in the beginning, we need simple checkout to provide info how
customers can pay for their orders via Internet banking etc., but later
we'd like to offer accepting of credit cards payment, so having nice
infrastructure in the typo3-based shop to easily write custom payment
module for the form-api gateway would be great.

In the future, we may need to add some calendaring extension so that
customers can 'book' free time for their appointment when ordering some
service.

f) support for Croatian language so that we do not need to translate
front-end from the scratch.

That's pretty much all what we need at the moment and wonder how TYPO 3 can 
fulfill those requirements?

While playing with 4.7.6 introduction package I noticed it's a bit
sluggish - the PHP memory limit is set to 256MB, although my shared
(webfaction-like) account can use maximum 500MB, so I'm interested if I
could use TYPO3 in such environment to serve the above
low-traffic site(s)?

Based on what I read and heard, it seems that one can accomplish a lot
just by using Typoscript without the need to go low-level and write
extension in PHP? Is it true?

I do not mind learning a bit of PHP, but I simply do not find myself as
Pro PHP developer writing complex extensions.

How is TYPO3 support for non-Apache servers? 

Is it possible to rewrite its mod-rewrite rules to suit
Cherokee/Lighttpd/Nginx which could provide better performance than
Apache?

Any caching tip I do miss to optimize my 'introduction' site's
experience?
 
Many extensions listed in the registry seems outdated/old and wonder
what is the backward compatibility for extension in general?

Will the present extension continue to work in the upcoming TYPO3-6
which I could not install today...but that's for another message.

Considering the work on Neos and that learning TYPO3 is significant
investment of time for the future, will the knowledge  about TYPO3-4 &
TYPO3-6 be useful for Neos, at least, in the scope of Typoscript?

Excuse me for a long post, but it's not a simple decision and I must
say that based on what we experienced so far, TYPO3 is really in
another CMS league, from the application itself, to the organization,
size etc.

Any advice is welcome.


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 
The humble sages, by virtue of true knowledge, see with equal 
vision a learned and gentle brāhmana, a cow, an elephant, a dog 
and a dog-eater.

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