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The Typo3 Content Management System Abomination

Thursday, 29 September 2011

The only reason this exists is because I have no choice but to deal with a particularly abominable ‘content management system’ called Typo3 at my current place of work, instead something better like, for instance, Django.

Trying to get clean HTML markup out of Typo3 is like trying to write a letter while hot rotten soup is intermittently splashed on your desk. With Django’s template language you can get the exact markup you write to display on your page, in whatever format you wish, XML, JSON, HTML, plain text, CSV, etc.
URL design is important and a CMS should provide complete freedom in designing a URL structure. While Typo3 (and other CMSs) provide ‘clean URL’ functionality, these continue to have limitations inherited from their CMS architecture. Django’s URL Dispatcher gives one complete freedom in designing URLs and mapping them to Views.
Typo3’s documentation is terrible. Compare the quality and search speed to Django’s.
Too many clicks are required to perform basic tasks in Typo3’s labyrinthine administration interface. Users get frustrated and inefficient and make frequent mistakes. Instead of being able to perform simple tasks themselves they need to ask webmasters of programmers to do things such as publish new articles, re-order pages, create (and close) new polls, and assign appropriate permissions to published content for them. And even for the webmasters and programmers, who work with computers every day, these simple things are hard to do. Welcome back to 1999! Meanwhile Django has a clean, easy-to-use administration interface designed to get out of your way and let you publish content quickly.
Typo3 is a difficult CMS to secure properly. Users risk having their login details compromised and site data risks tampering or loss. Typo3 files sit inside a site’s publically-accessible folder by default, opening various attack vectors if the webmaster forgets to assign correct permissions or misconfigures a web server setting. Typo3 also advertises itself in the HTML source code of every website it unpowers, which gives potential attackers valuable information—what CMS the site uses: 
Typo3 is slow and users prefer fast to slow. Too many database queries are generated by Typo3. Even if you don’t care about your users, did you know page speed is now factored into Google search rankings? According to Google Webmaster tools site performance overview results for a site I work with which uses Typo3 on average the pages in the site take 7.7 seconds to load and this is slower than 89% of all sites tracked by Google Webmaster tools.

If you are an experienced software developer for a large website I recommend Django, Ruby on Rails or, if you like to ride the cutting edge, Express JS. Small-to-medium website? Drupal, Textpattern or Wordpress.

The bottom line: Stay away from Typo3.

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