[TYPO3-UG India] Few Questions about Typo3

[Suman Debnath]

Criticism of TYPO3 are desirable and even solicited when constructive. 
However, poorly researched arguments and personal viewpoints are not 
going to help anybody.

> I would NOT use typo3 again:

Good for you. TYPO3 is not for everybody. It has a specific section of 
the users in mind. Simply not suitable for personal and so-called 
'dynamic' websites.

> 1. Its cumbersome

Define cumbersome. I think it is a relative term and depends on the 
skill level of the person making that statement. As I said before, TYPO3 
is not for everybody.

> 2. far more complex than necessary

Very complex, yes. But not more than is necessary. It is meant for a 
different group of users. Smaller sites requiring much less would be 
better off with another CMS.

> 3. lots of documentation and tips are in German only

This is a plain wrong statement. Anybody going to the documentation page 
will be able to see that. Do you have any experience with TYPO3 in the 
last 2.5 years ?

> 4. narrow field of experts

Again a criticism with no meaning. What is a 'narrow field of experts' ? 
There are over 20,000 developers registered on typo3.org. Even 
considering that most of them are not 'experts', that leaves quite a 
few. And not everybody needs to be a TYPO3 guru to do good work in it.

> 5. prone to break down

Really ? Can you give any case studies ? The peak usage of 
http://cisce.in is around 1,000 concurrent connections/second and this 
is TYPO3 based. Of course, it is assumed the developer/company is 
familiar with optimization techniques.

> 8. very difficult to learn for new users

I agree if you are talking about developers/admins. The extensibility 
and feature lit comes with a price. I don't agree if you are talking 
about editors. For front end users, it solely depends upon the developer.

> 9. expensive to maintain and host compared with competition

How so ? It is expensive if you mean that you can't hire many of the 
so-called 'php developers' at low wages. TYPO3 does require somebody 
with decent expertise. As far as hosting is concerned, it can be easily 
hosted on almost any LAMP server out there. Of course, the usage pattern 
would always dictate the system requirements (as in the case of any 
server application).

> 10. NOT intuitive, particularly in the back end.

Again, this is a relative term. I don't think it is any less intuitive 
than anything offering the same level of features.

> There are better options out there... Note finally that google has
> recently gotten behind Drupal and I bet you and your (client?) will
> appreciate the larger community.

Drupal, Joomla, etc are very good products but operate in a different 
class altogether. TYPO3 competes with Plone and maybe ezPublish.

> Typo3 will do a slow sunset into obscurity.

Does not seem so from our perspective. In the last year, volume of our 
TYPO3 business has more than tripled. I will say this though, very few 
people making personal sites would be interested in TYPO3. There are far 
better applications out there for those purposes.

Regards,
Suman Debnath

Srijan Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
304 Bakshi House,
40-41 Nehru Place,
New Delhi - 110019
INDIA
Ph: 91-11-2622 5926/ 5931
Fax: 91-11-5160 8543
Email: info at srijan.in
Web: www.srijan.in
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See our Typo3 demos at: http://typo3.srijan.in/index.php?id=4

> Best,
> 
> WGS