[TYPO3-hci] Another approach

[Alex Heizer]

I think this is a great way to look at the issues (I'm not going to use 
the word "problems" in regards to this, because often people use words 
like "problems" and "wrong" to support an opinion).  :)

JoH wrote:
>
> Have you ever made similar experiences?
> What do your clients say about TYPO3? Do they like it?
> And if yes: What exactly is it they like about TYPO3?
>   
What my clients seem to like best is that their site is laid out 
representationally, because of the page tree. Other CMSes, like 
Documentum, are very unintuitive as to how a given page fits into the 
site, as a whole. This becomes more of an issue as the site grows to 
hundreds of pages (including news articles, etc.). When training 
clients, I can observe them naturally scanning down the list to find the 
page they need to edit, based on what they know of the site and finding 
the page quicker than they can locate a Word document in their My 
Documents folder on their Desktop. They like using an RTE to edit 
content, so that's always a must-have, and they don't care about which 
one it is so long as it has bold, italics and add-a-link features. In my 
experience, editors don't give the interface a second thought about what 
it doesn't have, or if they can have a choice, *so long as* I explain to 
them the steps to complete a task from start to finish. They are very 
task-oriented rather than process-oriented, and the TYPO3 UI seems to 
not be a hindrance to them performing tasks so long as they are shown 
the steps (meaning, all of the common things that most editors will ever 
do is right out in front where they can get to them easily).
> What are your Top 10 features you would never want to miss?
> What made you choose TYPO3 as a tool - besides the fact that it came for
> free ;-) - and why didn't you choose another CMS?
>   
Top 10 features for myself (all are important, so this is not in order 
of preference):
* - visual page tree view
* - extensibility
* - configurable user/group roles
* - ability to SU as an editor to see their exact environment as them 
(and switching back in v4.0)
* - Filelist capabilities (upload/manage files, etc)
* - templating system to configure sites/page-branches/pages as needed
* - simple ways to create menus dynamically through TS
* - CSS/XHTML compliance support
* - import/export with T3Ds
* - fe_users
* - per-page and installationwide logging
* - multiple sites in one page tree (this is an AWESOME feature, and 
CANNOT be removed!! :)

Okay, that was 12... but I could go on...
 
> IMHO it is better to improve the good stuff than to remove the stuff you
> regard as bad.
> a) because others might not have the same opinion but they can't use
> features anymore if they are kicked
> b) because the overall quality will rise when we start making better what is
> already regarded to be good
> Improving successful features will eliminate the rest automatically by
> natural selection.
>   
Exactly. The fastest route to progress is to provide options for 
improving, rather than simply complaining about what is bad about a 
thing.  By providing options, such as "I had a problem with feature "A", 
but I think we can make it better by doing these things...", we may find 
that others have been looking for an answer to the same problem, or we 
may find that we are the only one who had that problem. But either way, 
now we have a solution that can be applied in the future if a similar 
situation arises that needs fixing.

What we have with T3 is already incredible, especially compared to other 
CMSes out there. There are some things that need some polishing and 
streamlining and a few more "nice" features added to them (like when 
someone added nested user groups to the be groups). Sometimes we get 
focused on "changing" something that's mostly there instead of just 
"finishing" it, going the final 5% of the distance.

Cheers,
Alex

> It's up to you now ...
>
> Joey
>
>