[TYPO3-hci] BE vs FE

[Michael Scharkow]

Waldemar Kornewald wrote:

[lots of stuff]

Waldemar,

I honestly don't see why we should make TYPO3 more Plone-like. If you 
need a more portal-like CMS have a look at drupal or a nuke clone. If 
you only dislike Plone for performance or deployment reasons, than 
violating TYPO3 to behave like Plone looks like an awkward decision to me.

TYPO3 is mainly a tool to put content online, not a community or 
collaboration framework. This has been done intentionally because there 
are tons of good frameworks for this, like Plone or trac or Mediawiki. I 
don't see the point of you using TYPO3 when you disagree with any and 
every design decision in it:

1. If you need a system to manage web pages in many languages, with 
flexbible templating, on-the-fly image manipulation and all that, then 
TYPO3 is for you.

2. If you need community features like user-registration, user-owned 
profiles and pages, discussion forums, whatever, TYPO3 is *not* the 
right tool unless you know what you're doing.

3. Both the page tree and content elements are indeed a very brilliant 
idea because you can easily move stuff around, you have infinite 
flexibility in re-using content and doing translations.

4. FE users are an add-on concept that has nothing to do with content 
editing but is solely there for access restrictions to *viewing* content.

5. Typical TYPO3 sites are basically non-interactive. This might not 
sound very WEB 2.0ish where anybody can tag and edit anything and make 
an RSS feed out of it, but there are still millions of web sites that 
don't need FE users at all.

6. In-place (or FE) editing might sound like a good idea for small 
sites, but it sucks for everything that has no direct representation in 
the page, and it sucks for training of editors. Unless the structure of 
content input is trivial (like in Wordpress), there's no use in mixing 
your site layout with content input.
There is a reason why practically every plone site looks identical: A 
consistent usability can only be done with a consisten layout structure. 
  Using a separate BE enables you to train your editors without needing 
to stick to a particular page layout or template.

7. News, forums, blogs are *not* the first thing I'm installing in TYPO3 
because they are more complicated to set up and have less features than 
most dedicated frameworks.

Cheers,
Michael