[TYPO3-UG US] OT: Forms, accessibility (was Drupal vs. TYPO3)

[Ries van Twisk]

On May 6, 2009, at 10:58 PM, Christopher Torgalson wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 8:23 PM, virgil huston  
> <virgil.huston at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi Christopher,
>>
>> Can you explain more what you mean by TYPO3's weaknesses in Forms and
>> Backend? The BE seems very accessible to me, so I don't understand  
>> what the
>> problem is.
>
> I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that, in terms of web
> accessibility, TYPO3's BE is a complete failure. I don't see how,
> short of a complete rewrite, it could possibly be made to comply with
> any government's or standards organization's accessibility
> requirements (e.g. section 508, WAI etc). Drupal's, admin areas by

I understand what your are saying, and personally I am not familiar
with Section 508. But I believer the TYPO3 BE is vastly superior to  
Drupal,
Not it therms of Section 508 but it's usability and easy of working  
for non tech users.

Recently we have tried Drupal and I just cannot figure out how menu's  
work,
and I just don't understand why I need to be IN the website the edit/ 
manage stuff.
Drupal doesn't seems to have a backend interface. Or may be I am  
wrong, but
I had a hard time understanding how Druapl works, eg... where are my  
pages?!?!?!
No page tree and no visual clue how my site is laid out.


> comparison could be made highly accessible with a comparatively small
> effort (i.e. without rewriting the application from scratch...it'd
> still be a lot of work, depending on the level of accessibility
> required). In some ways I suspect (though I haven't studied the output
> closely) that Drupal 6 has made some steps backward with its increased
> reliance on javascript...

I don't think you need to rewrite TYPO3 to make it comply with Section  
508,
but I agree it's quite a bit of work to do so.

>
> With respect to forms, I'm speaking of the incredibly, fantastically,
> unbelievably, spectacularly, shockingly, amazingly inefficient
> templating method used in extensions such as sr feuser register (it's
> not the fault of this extension, and I don't mean to single it
> out--it's just the extension I need to use most often that uses this
> method of templating...) and others where, if a project requires that
> templates be customized, you must rewrite multiple versions of the
> same forms. The template file tx_srfeuserregister_pi1_css_tmpl.html
> used by sr feuser register is 3198 lines long. Keep in mind it
> contains NOTHING but html. The effort required to fully customize this
> file is simply unbelievable.

I agree, sr_fe_userregistration is a good example of how hard it is.
I didn't really had problems adding it to my site, but to customize it
specially to my needs. It almost seems faster/easer to write an  
extension with
smarty and go from there :)


>
> Drupal, on the other hand, has a reasonably robust forms API which
> makes the development of modules with forms fairly straightforward.

I think this is pretty straigh forward with TYPO3 aswell,
it's just that some people make it so hard.

T3BLOG for example uses a FULLY typoscript templating system.
You get headaches just thinking about that !!! (1200 lines of code for  
BlogList)
Some other extensions do a good job and write these extensions quite  
nice and easy to modify.
Usually changing CSS is enough.


> More to the point, Drupal's theming system makes it possibly to change
> the rendering of some or all forms in a much more generic way (i.e.
> without the need to customize each state of each form in every
> application).

Yuck... with the name 'Theming' it always make me think going back
to PHP nuke and there blocked stuff... horrible.

When we tried Drupal 2 weeks ago I found it VERY hard to
put MY design in drupal and make the whole system work with that.
In the end I couldn't... )dreaming about TYPO3 really) and
how easy it is to make your own designs.

> TYPO3 extensions can work in essentially the same way of
> course--instead of using html templates, it's just necessary to use TS
> templates using FORM and other cObjects.

You don't have to use FORMS and cObjects. Using smarty is generally
a quite ok method to work. Or even 'normal' HTML templates.
As long as it's good organized.
Don't forgot some extensions as build up on request and build up on  
request
and build...... like tt_news... easr then user register, but still
hard to make it they way you want.
But all this is not really teh fault of a extension developer but TYPO3
that doesn't have a solid API. Although people could use smarty....

> So in this way, it's less a
> limitation of TYPO3 as such than it is a limitation of several of the
> currently available tools that must be used with TYPO3 (i.e. in use
> cases such as user registration which are not handled by the core
> itself).

Full agreed there

>
> -- 
> Christopher Torgalson
> http://www.typo3apprentice.com/
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