Typo3
Picked up the RFP for the Municipal web site the other day, it’s lacking in details but the main thing that stands out is that they are looking for a Content Management System of some sort judging by the long list of tools they wanted included on the web site. Off I go to the CMS Matrix to see what there is that will fit the bill in the Open Source world. Choosing Mambo, PhpNuke, OpenPHPNuke, PHPWebSite, Drupal, and Typo3, it was Typo3 that came out on top.
Off to the web site, the first thing that hits you is that this is some serious CMS here with all the bells and whistles. Like most of the others, the usual warnings about the complexity etc. were there, but undaunted I downloaded the Win version to test locally. Set up went okay with out too many hitches, the main one being ImageMagick didn’t want to be recognized even when I specified the file path to it’s executables. Didn’t want to bother updating my autoexec.bat file for the umpteenth time so downloaded a stand alone version and it worked fine. The site loaded into the download came up okay too, but the app was running incredibly slow on my old ‘puter. Keeping my fingers crossed it’s not the same way on a live server and plowing through tutorials with the Dummy site, a second download that starts you out from scratch, much better than the “full” version to learn from.
The Wow! moment for me was when Typo3 parsed an html template and inserted it’s own >!—###DOCUMENT_HEADER### begin—< elements into the html output, this means that any designer can give you a template for a web site and without changing the template AT ALL, anywhere you want dynamic bits like menus, body content etc. you can have them. Did I mention you can run multiple web sites from one installation? Everyone is looking for the holy grail of CMS’s of course, this one is seriously in the running with that feature alone.
UPDATE: After using Typo3 for almost two weeks, have come to the conclusion that the interface for the web site admin and other end users is way too complicated. Weeks and weeks of training for the main site admin alone, more for the content providers, too bad…