TYPO3 4.0.3 RC1 review

TYPO3 is a free Open Source content management system for enterprise purposes on the web and in intranets. TYPO3 offers full flexi

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Kasper Sk?rh?j

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TYPO3 is a free Open Source content management system for enterprise purposes on the web and in intranets.

TYPO3 offers full flexibility and extendability while featuring an accomplished set of ready-made interfaces, functions and modules.

What Users can do wiht "TYPO3":
Authoring: Platform independent, publish everywhere: The website can be edited through any computer connected to the internet with a current web browser - wherever you are, no other software needed.
More than 33 backend languages: Users are served with a full integration of more than 33 languages including english, danish, german, norwegian, italian, french, spanish, dutch, czech, polish, slovenian, finnish, turkish, russian, romanian, portuguese and swedish. See this page for complete list.
WYSIWYG editing: A Rich Text Editor (RTE) allows users to format text, insert images and create internal and external links just like in Word or any other word processor. Currently, only accessible through Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows PC's. (All other browsers do not support RTE yet, but otherwise work fine)
Automatic design preservation: Text formatting is foolproof. Your work will always match the basic design settings of the page. Therefore visual integrity is ensured while authoring articles.
Automated image processing: Typo3 offers automatic management of images, ensuring correct size and quality for the web.. “Magic image” technology in the RTE ensures full quality control of proportions and size.
Fast and intuitive interface: The fast backend interface works in any modern web browser, is highly streamlined and fully customizable for any extensions. Reuse of components and consistency of concepts within makes the TYPO3 backend easy to navigate and understand.
The division into primary and secondary form fields allows the user to see only the most frequently used input options, while advanced options are normally hidden and displayed on demand.
Clipboard and Copy/Cut/Paste: The well known copy/cut/paste concept is used with the internal clipboard to manage rearrangement of all internal objects. For repositioning of pages and content elements, wizards are available to do the job even easier!
Context sensitive menu: A context sensitive menu gives users direct access to the most popular functions of an object with a single click on it's icon. This saves time and spares hands and wrists of users operating a mouse daily.
Innovative shortcuts: Repetitive operations and frequently used internal modules can be captured as a shortcut in a single click. Having a collection of shortcuts, users can jump around inside TYPO3 in no time at all. Shortcuts can be grouped, named and even imposed by administrators upon user groups.
Easy addition of hyperlinks: Links are applied with extreme ease. TYPO3 insures that there are no "broken" or "dead" links within the system.
Wizards: TYPO3 features wizards for making tables, bullet lists, mail forms, etc.
Content Management:: All kinds of content types are to be added through easy to understand forms. No technical limit to the amount of items accomodated by the content structure per site, per category or per page.
Page tree structure: Pages are arranged in a clear hierarchic tree structure well known by any computer user from the local computer filesystem with folders and files.
File and media management: The internal filemanager allows users to upload, rename, copy, move, delete and even edit files online. Backend users and groups can be assigned private home-directories on the server. Any filepath on the server - internally or reachable from the internet - can be “mounted” in TYPO3.
Multiple Page Editing: Any level of pages can be loaded into an editing form specifying parameters like name, date online/offline, etc. to be edited at the same time!
Offline editing status: Each page content item, not just the complete page or a branch can be kept in an offline state until finished and then be published by one single click.
Preview content online: Hidden, time- or access restricted content can be easily previewed in it's real environment.
Context sensitive help: The backend interface offers context sensitive help from small icons. The help texts are available in local languages.
Scheduled publishing: Pages and page content as well as news items can be set to automatically go on and offline.
Import: MS Word documents - or other rich text content from client applications or the web - can easily be imported by simple copy-paste.
Version Management: All of the changes to a document are recorded in a version management system. There is an infinite undo option within a complete and legible view of the documents version history.
Multilanguage: Different language versions can be inserted and maintained on a per-page basis instead of having to create seperate page trees.
Personalization: Through PHP, user logins and the unique speed-optimized integration of dynamic content, you can personalize the web experience for the visitors to the website.
Plugins: Many default plugins are available such as forums, calendars, guestbooks, sitemaps, banner-controls, email-forms, polls, ratings, faqs, glossaries, news, and online shop systems. The list of user contributed "install-in-one-click" plugins is growing daily in the online extension repository.
Direct Mail module / Newsletter system: A Direct Mail system is able to send highly personalized emails to newletter subscribes. A unique filtering technology allows a batch of thousands of rich media emails to be customized in one billion combinations and tagged with personal recipient information. Response-tracking gives a detailed image of campaign success.
Indexed search engine: Indexed full text search in TYPO3 pages and external media files like TXT, HTML, MS Word and PDF-files. Includes advanced options for searching only parts of a website and intelligent relevance rated display of results. Direct search in SQL database tables is of course possible as well.
Frontend editing: All contents can be edited through the website itself even more intuitively. Simply click on the content you want to edit while browsing the pages. An administration panel is available for the user on the frontend webpage. This allows users to edit, move objects, delete or hide pages, manage lists of database records directly and intuitively on the webpage. A technology closely resembling the award winning “SmartEdit” technology known from RedDot CMS.
Minimal training needed: WYSIWYG editing, frontend editing, table and form wizards, automatic image handling, generation of graphics on-the-fly - these features make any average PC user an effective content author in seconds.
Time to market: Content bypasses typical bottlenecks of licenced software and single access. Any number of editors can be enabled through TYPO3 to create the website!

What Administrators can do with "TYPO3":
Detailed user management & customization: Ready-to-run defaults combined with an extreme level of customizing options (defined in TypoScript syntax) provide the possibility to fine tune the backend authoring environment for every user or whole groups and subgroups.
Permission control: Access control of pages is available on user, owner and group scheme (similar to UNIX). Additional security provided by locking users to certain mountpoints in the page tree.
User management and overview: Authorize backend users and groups to access and edit only certain objects and modules in certain sections of the website. Simple or complex roles can be assigned to users. An overview tool makes it easy to analyse the permissions of a large amounts of users. The systems scales from a handfull to thousands of users and groups with ease.
Pageview statistics: Statistics are available ranging from simple internal hit-counters to advanced analysis of standard or extended logfiles written out by TYPO3. Furthermore, page impressions made by previews from staff members can be excluded, so only true page hits from customers are written to logfiles: You get a precise picture of your success on the web.
Workflow engine: A straight line workflow engine makes production and approval of content a breeze in a workgroup of authors, editors and reviewers.
Simultaneous Editing Warning: Simultaneous editing and potential loss of work is prevented since a warning sign is displayed to users trying to access a record already opened. To administrators, the time since the record has been accessed and the user name is visible.
Task Center for workgroup collaboration: A powerful Task Center provides administrators, authors and editors with a To-Do list, messaging system, notepad, and shortcuts to recently processed objects.
Logging: All backend activitites are logged and changes can be monitored, tracked and rolled back. This prevents accidental loss of information.
Version control and unlimited undo's: Sub-version control - called “history” - allows an unlimited levels of undo for all objects. Also, TYPO3 offers "difference" analysis between current and previous states of an object allows reviewers or editors to quickly identify changes in objects through the workflow process.
Raw database access: TYPO3 acts like an advanced database manager with a high-level frontend for manipulating database content. Another popular PHP-application, the database manager phpMyAdmin, has been integrated into TYPO3 and preconfigured with the current database. TYPO3 automatically handles the access to phpMyAdmin. With phpMyAdmin administrators, are allowed to do really low level operation of the database.
Advanced multilevel caching: Demanding processes such as generation of menus and image scaling is done only once due to the caching capabilities of TYPO3. Calculations are made on the first request and subsequently served from the internal cache.
Staging System included: TYPO3 can be configured to be used in a Live-/Production Server Environment dividing the Production Server from the Webserver for maximum security and webserver performance.

What Developers can do with "TYPO3":
TypoSript Meta Language: TYPO3 has an advanced template technology based on its own configuration language, TypoScript, which is parsed by the system to build the actual pages, including graphical menues, headers and more.
Cascading Templates: TypoScript is arranged in templates in the built-in editor (complete with online reference and debug tool) and provides a powerful possibilty to control and design the complete site on all levels from a meta-perspective, instead of configuration on page-level. Templates can be cascaded and allow overriding of values on further levels. Standard TypoScript templates allow easy entry by providing working out-of-the-box configurations.
HTML-Templates: Other template types are HTML-files for swift configuration of the display of news, a message board, etc. HTML-Templates can also be used for the complete site.
Template scalability: With an architecture allowing an unlimited number of templates you can not only implement different templates for different audiences for a single site - you can do it for any number of parallel sites as well!
Template analysis tools: Along with the TypoScript engine comes a dedicated module for template creation, featuring a Constant Editor for general design options and an Object Browser for a precise look into the TypoScript object hierarchy. A Template Analyser provides an overview of the nested order of included templates.
Reduced redesign times: Redesign times are seriously reduced - central changes in templates affects whole sections of the website at once. Last-minute changes are easily incorporated due to the flexible technology and server side image creation/manipulation.
Extension manager: Having the TYPO3 core system installed you can add extensions from the large online extension repository with no coding in a single one-click operation. Boost your installation with e-commerce solutions, community portals, messageboards, discussion-forums, calendars, polls, search-features, guestbooks, rating applications in a matter of seconds through this hassle-free tool.
Extension kickstarter wizard: Need custom coding? The extension wizard kickstarts the making of plugins and guides the developer to follow the recommended guidelines for making plugins and modules. This ensures adherence to the TYPO3 architecture standards which is for your own good since it allows for easy updates by dividing core and extension files. It will even help you to easily share your work with the friendly TYPO3 developer community.
Own PHP4 scripts: It is still possible to have every imaginable connection to external data sources by integrating your own PHP-scripts through TYPO3. Needing to display an XML newsfeed, or do you need to query a database? If it's not already available in the extension repository, you can make it yourself using this world standard web scripting language.
Multimedia integration: Integration of multimedia elements like video, audio, flash animations, Java applets etc. Custom HTML code can be included easily.
Protected areas: Provide intranets, extranets and password protected sections of the website. Utilize security features such as IP filtering. Access is controlled by users and groups and can be restricted on both page and single object levels. Furthermore TYPO3 can run under SSL, different ports than port 80 and from alternative admin-directories if you are very paranoid.
Metatag content: Meta data such as description and keywords can be entered generally for a template and for individual pages. Further meta data can easily be applied through custom extensions to any object in the system.
Publish static, dynamic and cached content: Publish any mixture of static HTML (for speed), dynamic content (for database interaction) or a truely mix of dynamic and cached content for the best of both. Run any third party product simultaneously with TYPO3 on a site if needed.
Search engine compatible: Compatible with all search engines (webcrawlers) - all pages will be indexed (software requirements apply).
Output formats: Template engine allows for browser detection, printable versions, versions for PDAs etc., use of CSS stylesheets, WML for mobile phones, XML for data exchange, SGML for print. Any output format can be generated by PHP-extensions.
Version Control with unlimited Undo: All changes can be tracked throughout the complete development phase. You can always view changes and go back.
Migration in stages: Because TYPO3 can coexist with static HTML-files you can settle for a gradual conversion from static to a dynamic site. You don't have to complete such a migration if you prefer certain sections being static. TYPO3 can even be configured to work with portions of content inside the static files in a controlled manner.
Install Tool: The Install Tool eases both the installation and upgrade procedures needed. It analyzes the PHP configuration and available server components. It also offers diagnostic tools for testing that all the features are working properly. Basic installation is done in less than a minute, including database creation and dump.
Easy updates: Upgrades from any previous version are performed in a snap because the Install Tool identifies any database updates needed and provides a one-click opportunity to perform the necessary changes. Your own files and tables are always protected. On UNIX Systems, the updating procedure is designed to make the exchange of the codebase possible by replacing one (!) symlink.
TYPO3 Testsite: Typo3 comes with a comprehensive collection of example pages and configurations for all kinds of content types and menues.
Multiple projects/websites: TYPO3 is built for management of multiple, independent websites in the same installation. This makes it perfect for application service providers (ASPs/ISPs) or web agencies managing many small to medium size sites for customers.

Here are some key features of "TYPO3":
Browser based: Typo3 requires no special software installed for users. All modern graphical browser can be used. Internet Explorer 5+ is recommended though.
Strong PHP4 / MySQL: Based on the extremely popular and fast PHP4 scripting language combined with MySQL. Thus a basic TYPO3 installation can be used with most ISP's today.
Optional image processing: Features like image processing requires extra, but commonly available server software like GDlib, Freetype and ImageMagick.
Sound codebase: Strict project guidelines, naming convension policies and a full overview of system globals provide a clean codebase. All relevant source code is encapsulated in classes which can all easily be extended by a PHP-programmer.
Relational Database: Storage of content is done in a very fast relational database. See www.MySQL.org for benchmark information.
Security: Secure file downloads can be configured. Password submission and storage (backend) is md5-encrypted. IP-filtering can be applied for intranets, extranets and administration sections. Multi-state login-notification by email provides effective “burglar alarm”. True encryption of data-transfer available through standard webserver Secure Socket Layer (SSL).