[TYPO3-hci] BE vs FE

[Waldemar Kornewald]

On 7/31/06, Michael Scharkow <michael at underused.org> wrote:
> 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.

Please don't get me wrong. I'm just trying to get new ideas on board.
And I'm definitely not trying to make another Plone. All I want is a
CMS that is at least as *intuitive* as Plone. It should be as easy as
possible to create content because that's what a CMS is for! If this
is done with a BE then it's okay, too.

Drupal is one of the most terrible CMSes I've seen. Adding a simple
page that holds text can't be less intuitive and more complicated. We
have the impression that most CMSes really hate usability.

What we're after is not necessarily a community CMS. All we need is a
way for users to create an account, so they can access our bug tracker
and possibly be granted access to special website sections and maybe
the backend. We don't need people posting to our blog and we don't
insist on allowing users to add comments, though it would be nice,
sometimes.

> 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.

Yep, that's what we need.

> 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.

We only need user-registration for single-sign-on.

> 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.

The question is: how much flexibility is actually reasonable? Many
people want more than they need and most projects can't stop adding
new features because they think they have to make those 0.001% with
very uncommon needs happy.

> 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.

This still doesn't explain why you should separate them. That's bloat.
A simple flag or role could definitely do the same. And there is
definitely no reason to disallow BE users from accessing the FE. OTOH,
disallowing FE users from logging to the BE makes sense, but this can
easily be solved using permissions instead of building a whole new
concept. The point is that it's a lot more complicated than it has to
be.

> 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.

I agree about FE users not being needed by all sites.

> 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.

Yes, that's a good point, but the real problem is that it gets more
difficult to create a skin if you have to support FE-editing. It's not
impossible, though.
But I'd be fine with a backend for editing content as long as it works
without me having to think about it.

> There is a reason why practically every plone site looks identical: A
> consistent usability can only be done with a consisten layout structure.

Well, most community Plone sites look identical. But often you don't
even know that you are visiting a Plone-served site because companies
normally have a totally different skin (look at some Plone hosting
providers' websites). Of course, those systems work with the normal
Plone skin on the backend because it's too difficult to write a
FE-editable skin...

> 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.

Yes, they are too complicated to set up. No, dedicated frameworks are
not an option for most sites because they need one single integrated
package. We're not building a half-baked site and integrating those
other frameworks is too difficult. Only private and community sites
need/use those dedicated frameworks and many people don't like it when
they must leave the main site to read the blog.

Bye,
Waldemar Kornewald