[Typo3-dev] CMS Port to Typo3

[Suman Debnath]

Hi Everybody,

First of all sorry for the length of this post but I'm trying to give enough 
detail so you understand what I'm talking about while still keeping it brief 
enough so your eyes don't glaze over. Also, I felt it was not an 
implementation/troubleshooting issue as such so posted it here instead of 
typo3.english.

We run an application service provider that targets very small to medium 
sized non-profits in the US. Because of my user's technical incompetence I 
have tried to make my interfaces as simple and uncluttered as possible while 
still giving them enough power so that their websites are actually useful. I 
wrote my own CMS in cold fusion but am now tired of maintaining it and am 
seriously looking at migrating everything to typo3. However, keeping my 
existing workflow is very important to me and so this email is a plea to you 
for aid in telling me if what I want to do is possible in typo3.

1) Our administrative interfaces are all in flash. This has allowed us to 
provide very intuitive drag and drop type tools to our end users akin to 
what they would use on say, their mac. The tools communicate through flash 
remoting to the backend. Is it possible to put a flash remoting layer to 
CERTAIN operations in the typo3 framework? Has anyone done this before?

2) Website users edit the site through what you would call the frontend i.e. 
they browse through the site and click on little edit buttons next to an 
image or piece of text. The page refreshes and the place where the content 
was before is now replaced with the appropriate editor (which communicates 
via flash remoting to update the content). This is distinctly different from 
the demos I've seen of front end editing in typo3 where a popup window shows 
up containing the editor. What is involved in implementing this within 
typo3?

3) I do have one admin tool in the backend. This tool allows people to 
create pages and assign a template to them (similar I assume to 
templavoila). The templates are things like page with one photo, photo 
gallery, page with calendar, page with fundraising campaign etc. Once they 
have chosen a template, they can go to the front end to fill in the actual 
content. I assume this is possible using templavoila, but I'm worried about 
the alpha nature of it. How stable have you all found it to be? This admin 
tool also allows people to drag and drop nodes in a tree to reorganize the 
site and reorder the pages within a particular section. These would also 
need to be mapped to the appropriate api calls.

4) There is only 1 codebase for all sites i.e. the webroot of all our sites 
is the same. The system looks up the domain name and gets a site id. This is 
then used to look up the hierarchy of pages and the specific template to 
use. I haven't found anything in my look through the documentation about 
whether this is possible in typo3. Is this possible?

5) I've written my own flash based rich text editor which is fast and 
relatively stable (plus works in all browsers/os without the write 
once/debug everywhere nightmare of dhtml). I would be happy to offer it to 
the typo3 community for your use.

6) Finally the system needs to be able to create the skeleton of a site just 
by filling out a form. This also looks like it's possible judging by the 
templavoila demo I saw but I just wanted to double-check. My entire business 
is on the line here and I want to make sure I'm making the right decision.

The easiest way for me to migrate would be to create a flash remoting 
"facade" that takes all the traffic from my flash based editors, translates 
the information as needed for the specific typo3 API and then calls the 
typo3 api with this data. Does this approach make sense? Is there a better 
way to do it?

I have uploaded a few screenshots. Here are the links:
http://www.srijan.co.in/screenshots/image_editor.jpg
http://www.srijan.co.in/screenshots/main_interface.jpg
http://www.srijan.co.in/screenshots/original_page.jpg
http://www.srijan.co.in/screenshots/rich_text_editor.gif

Thanks in advance,
Suman Debnath