TYPO3 - Content Management System

TYPO3 is a powerful open source, enterprise-class CMS Platform, designed specifically with the needs of both enterprise and corporate clients in mind. 

Whilst many CMS platforms started life as blogs, DAMs, portals, online communities or e-commerce platforms, TYPO3 was designed specifically as a Website Content Management Platform (WCMS). The result is a CMS which offers a powerful and mature website publishing environment, that provides un-rivaled levels of flexibility and scalability.

With over 230,000 active sites currently running TYPO3, this is one of the most prolific and well used CMS platforms in its class.

Key Facts about TYPO3

• Robust set of enterprise features 
• Open source license 
• LAMP based architecture (Linux, Apache, MYSQL, PHP)
• Active develop community 
• Large library of Extensions
• Future proof architecture

Benefits of open source

Historically enterprise and corporates veered away from open source solutions, opting for the safety of commercial products. Open source is however now a fully accepted part of the enterprise IT infrastructure due to the many benefits - access to code, active develop community and the significant cost savings offered.

Selecting a CMS platform

When comparing content management platforms against your feature list, most CMS platforms should fair well, however this is only half the story, as the devil is really in the detail  - here we really need to focus on how well the features/functions are implemented....this is where TYPO3 really stands out from its contemporaries.

Features which make TYPO3 stand out

• Hierarchical content metaphor

  Many open source CMS's such as Drupal and Joomla started as blogging/social media platforms, resulting in convoluted publishing process for managing more hierarchical website content and pages.

  TYPO3 was designed from the ground level up as a web focused content management system, with powerful hierarchical content structures. Content is organised using a familiar site tree metaphor making it very easy to find and organise content - even across multiple websites

• Flexible paragraph-based layouts

  Most CMS platforms provide template-based layouts, requiring different templates for each different layout - these additional templates often need to be provided by the website’s developers as this task is beyond most editor’s skill sets.

  TYPO3 offers a much more powerful and flexible approach, that allows users to build page layouts as they edit / manage their content, ultimately providing a much more flexible approach than standard template based CMS platforms.

• Drag and drop editing of content and pages

  Whilst TYPO3 provides a number of different editing interfaces, one of the most useful editing features is the drag and drop functionality, which allows editors to quickly rearrange the site structure / content, by dragging and dropping pages and content - this provides editors with a more intuitive and flexible approach to managing their content, ultimately helping to improve the end result.

• Extension/Plug in architecture

  TYPO3’s powerful extension architecture sets it apart from other CMS platforms, allowing you to:

  a) as with other CMS platforms, create extensions and plugins to extend functionality
  b) more uniquely to create extensions to the core CMS application, ensuring behaviours can be modified/extended without compromising future upgradability

  With over 20,000 extensions available, the TYPO3 provides a wide array of extensions and plug-ins to cater for almost any need - including: Blogs, Polls, SOLR search, Social integration, Newsfeeds, Video integration and many, many more.

• Staging and workflow

  Whilst most CMS platforms offer some basic staging capabilities allowing you to work on a draft version of a page, enterprise customers require a much more powerful workflow.

  TYPO3‘s workspaces, provides a very mature and robust set of staging/workflow capabilities allowing editors to work on multiple draft versions of the website, providing draft links to senior team members who can preview and approve the content, ultimately enabling content to be published through different workspaces into the live production website.

  Most impressive is TYPO3’s ability to manage situations where only part of a workspace is approved, automatically managing what get published to the live environment and what does not, whilst also managing links.

• Version control and history

  Version control is an essential aspect of any enterprise class CMS allowing you to roll back to earlier versions of content, tracking who made changes and updates.

  Typo3 tracks every single element within the site (not just pages as in many CMS solutions), ensuring you have a full historic audit of pages, media and content on a user by user basis.

• Multi-Lingual support

  TYPO3 provides robust multi-lingual capabilities, allowing for both parity and non parity approaches to multi-lingual websites.

  One of our favorite capabilities is TYPO3’s ability to bulk export / import xml content to and from translation agencies, dramatically speeding up the translation process

• Multi-site management

  TYPO3 makes managing multiple website under a single install incredibly easy.

  Each site can be given different levels of user access - so different site owners can only see and edit their own site - whilst administrators can see all sites in the same environment

• Enterprise Authentication / integration

  Of utmost importance to enterprise/corporate clients is security, authentication and permissions.

  TYPO3 offers a granular permission system and can either run in a stand-alone mode, or it can authenticate against LDAP, Active directory or custom external services, ensuring you can integrate TYPO3 into your existing infrastructure.

TYPO3 compared to other solutions

After careful evaluation of most CMS’s available, we concluded that TYPO3 is the best general purpose CMS platform for clients who need a fully featured CMS, out performing the other open source alternatives which struggle to offer the true enterprise capabilities expected in the corporate world. TYPO3 also out classes most of the commercial options in terms of functionality, whilst adding the benefits of an active developer community and the low cost of ownership of an open source platform.

Below is a top level summary of the key CMS platforms: