[TYPO3-english] is TYPO3 for me

[Jigal van Hemert]

Hi Gour,

On 10-11-2012 19:18, Philipp Gampe wrote:
>> Finally, somehow, I have 'discovered' TYPO3 and, of course, could read
>> many 'hate' stories on the Net (there is even anti-TYPO3 list) where
>> several users complain how TYPO3 is complex, unintuitive, not many
>> usable extensions etc.
>
> Most of those people have never understood the core concepts or have simply
> given up after installing, because TYPO3 CMS does not come with a one click
> and go button. This is by intention, because TYPO3 CMS understands itself as
> "enterprise content management *framework*".

Yes, TYPO3 needs a lot of configuration in the eyes of some people, but 
in return it gives you a lot of possibilities.
One of the features you have probably seen a lot of criticism about is 
TypoScript. It is the configuration language which you use to put 
together the parts of the frontend of your website. It's used to 
configure the functions of extensions, you build things like menus, page 
structure, lookup information from the database, create images and a lot 
more with it.

Ask questions, tell what you know, what you've tried and what you want 
to achieve, but ask questions before the frustration builds up. There 
are plenty of newsgroups/mailing lists on various subjects and usually 
people are friendly and helpful if you show that you want to learn and 
invest some time in gaining knowledge and experience.

>> a) decent blog engine with comments, support for Disqus, possibly
>> pingback/trackback which would be use on all the three sites (private,
>> non-profit, company)
>
> TYPO3 is not really suitable as a real blog, but there is a very good news
> extension (called "news"), which is really really powerful. Combine it with
> one of the comment extensions (e.g. "comments" or "dialog") and you are
> almost there.
> Pingback/Trackback is not supported AFAIK.

There is also t3blog which does a lot of pingback/trackback stuff (I'm 
not really into blogging). Most people want in the end a method of 
publishing articles and letting visitors comment on that. The extensions 
Philipp mentioned can do that easily.

>> d) extension for document management to provide private downloadable
>> area for our (registered) clients, so that each client can access
>> his/her private support docs/multimedia-files etc. (to be used on
>> company site)
>
> You can not really do a full document management like with MS Sharepoint,
> but you can get really for with DAM.

And there is DAM frontend and a few other extensions which allow you to 
have downloads for visitors (and access restrictions to pages or content 
for frontend user groups is standard in the core), or even uploads. 
There is also secured download extensions which provide download links 
that are only working for a limited time, etc.

>> f) support for Croatian language so that we do not need to translate
>> front-end from the scratch.
>
> Have a look at http://translation.typo3.org/hr/

What is edited on that translation server needs to be reviewed and 
becomes later available for the entire world to be downloaded in the 
backend.

>> While playing with 4.7.6 introduction package I noticed it's a bit
>> sluggish - the PHP memory limit is set to 256MB, although my shared
>> (webfaction-like) account can use maximum 500MB, so I'm interested if I
>> could use TYPO3 in such environment to serve the above
>> low-traffic site(s)?
>
> 256MB should be fine.

That limit is mainly high to be able to perform some memory intensive 
processes in the backend. Processing the extension repository (so you 
can see the available extensions in the backend module "Extension 
Manager"), parsing Fluid templates (Fluid is one of the available 
templating engines) for the first time takes memory, etc.
There is a lot of caching available internally which will make the usual 
serving of pages a lot cheaper.

>> Based on what I read and heard, it seems that one can accomplish a lot
>> just by using Typoscript without the need to go low-level and write
>> extension in PHP? Is it true?

Yes, there is a surprising amount of things you can do with TypoScript 
without writing anything in PHP. The problem is that there are a lot of 
people who already know PHP and don't want to invest the time to learn 
the possibilities of TypoScript.
If you use an extension "X" which displays lists and details about books 
(just an example) and you need a special list which is not available in 
that extension you can do that with TypoScript. You can query the 
database, format each field you want to use, process it, etc. If for 
example you want to display a date field as a graphical calendar icon 
with the date printed on it, TypoScript lets you create such an image.

>> How is TYPO3 support for non-Apache servers?
>
> AFAIK most bigger sites moved to a nginx+varnish combination. In general,
> TYPO3 CMS does not depend on a specific webserver.

Correct. TYPO3 should run on Windows and Unix(-like) operating systems, 
a webserver, PHP and a database. MySQL is preferred, but the core should 
run on Oracle, PostgreSQL or MS SQL too. Extensions can perform MySQL 
specific operations and that might be a problem with other DBMS.

-- 
Jigal van Hemert
TYPO3 Core Team member

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