[TYPO3-dev] News from the newbie-front

[Johannes Reichardt]

Hi there,

today i made my first deal where i will be paid for typo3 developing i 
guess (other projects where just my own, not commercial). I got the job 
because the agency heard that typo3 is somewhat "cool´n sexy" in the cms 
scene. A cms that is free, powerful and does not limit your 
possibilities. They employ a few php/mysql related people who know their 
job well but are just about to start with typo3 - and therefore do not 
have enough knowledge yet to use typo3 for current customers. 
Nevertheless (sorry if this is boring to you just stop reading) - i 
talked to those programming related people about their expiriences with 
typo3.

The main developer i spoke to was trying template autoparser since it 
seemed a convinient way to make a template. He thought that it would be 
great and told me it would separate html completly from typo3 
configuration, which would make it easy for their html-only developer to 
participate and change layout afterwards. I was a little confused by the 
autoparser example since i never digged into template autoparser, but 
the complete seperation of html and typo3 seemed quite appealing. Also 
he showed me how to quickly change the style by just targeting another 
html file as the source for templating. (he was following a tutorial 
from typo3.org actually).

So far everything worked quite well, besides the typoscript setup seemed 
very confusing to me and somewhat spread over the site. But when he 
tried to leave the trail of the tutorial or to customize things a little 
more, he got completly lost. He was not able to take the next step and 
add an extension, so it gets into the template as well. He showed me a 
template for the extension but that was the *extension* template only - 
which was at that point very confusing actually. (One man who clicks 
fast around in an environment you don´t know and you have to follow that 
stuff and keep track of it;)

That led us to a discussion about the nice possibilities of that way of 
templating - he said it would be a great advantage to be able to chosse 
different html templates and separate those. I said that i don´t know 
this way of templating and prefer the direct way of putting typoscript 
where it belongs along with the html. In the end we both where confused, 
but i could convince him that this - quite appealing technique - would 
be too complex and "undirect" to maintain. The fact that its also not 
really possible in practice to seperate typo3 development completly from 
html development also convinced him. Also he had invested quite a few 
days in that way already.

I think there are a few interesting points about this objection. First i 
saw a beginner getting lost in a quite appealing technique that should 
more be sold as a "nice to have if you know your way around already" and 
secondly the appeal that those ways of programming can have, but 
unfortunatly confuse if you don´t know the basics (which basics?) already.

In the end i felt like an old fashioned hardliner who even suggested to 
first make their extensions with php_content and afterwards beam it into 
an extension, to keep the learning curve and "how to do things curve" as 
low as possible. Just wanted to share this expirience, since its funny 
that template_autoparser will feed me next month :)

- Johannes