Typo3 -- I've got a couple of questions.

Hello everyone, thanks for taking a look. I need your help/suggestions.

I plan to start development of a large membership website. I've looked at many CMS platforms and have decided that Typo3 has everything I want and I'm willing to go through the torturous learning curve!

It seems to me that Typo3 is far more powerful and professional than Joomla/Mambo (which I've used in the past) and I simply don't like Drupal.

I need to know how many people have actually used Typo3 for a considerable amount of time and what advice they have to offer.

Also, how about site design? Is it easy to apply custom templates or will this require some serious effort/cash?

How fast is this system? It seems pretty complex and I'm concerned that it might not be as fast as some of the others... what are your experiences?

How about backups? Do you have to do a SQL dump or can you export XML?

SEO? Is it possible?

How about getting pages indexed? Does it include an XML sitemap generator?

Thanks in advance.
Pete

 

I've been using typo3 on a large content site for about 18 months, and recently setup a multisite setup which will eventually contain around 370 individual sites running off a single source installation. As you already seem to know it's a steepish learning curve, but for sure one of the most powerful cms's out there.

To try and answer your questions:

Is it easy to apply custom templates or will this require some serious effort/cash?

- There are several good downloadable templates including template, image, css and typosript which you can base your own templates on. One of our larger sites runs section specific templates (over 70 at the moment) and it's pretty easy to keep everything running smoothly.

How fast is this system? It seems pretty complex and I'm concerned that it might not be as fast as some of the others... what are your experiences?

- Pretty slow out of the box, but there are many levels of caching available. For static content you have the option of using third party extensions to write out static html files, which gives an enormous speed increase.

How about backups? Do you have to do a SQL dump or can you export XML?

- You can use mysqldump for the database, or export directly from phpmyadmin which comes pre-configured in the backend. If you wish you can export content via XML as well as typo3's own proprietary format for sharing between sites.

SEO? Is it possible?

- The RealURL extension allows you to configure urls however you like, or for simple sites you can use simulate static urls (which is built in) to deliver search engine friendly URLs.

- How about getting pages indexed? Does it include an XML sitemap generator?

There are several sitemap generator extensions available. I use one called mc_googlesitemap which is excellent.

Hope this helps

 

That helps a lot. Thank you.

 

Can I ask what you don't like about Drupal? I can't think of a better CMS for membership purposes.

 

I can't say that it's not a good CMS, I just don't like it.

I feel lost whenever I try using it, the user interface isn't intuitive (for me) where Typo3 seems very logical, complicated but still logical.

Plus, Typo3 seems to be more of a FRAMEWORK rather than a system with set limitations (like most CMS software)... that's what makes it so much more powerful and scalable (at least that's the impression I get when I review it side by side with the others).