Why choose TYPO3 CMS for your website

Written by Will Chidlow on 1st December 2020

(Last updated 5th July 2023)

We’ll be honest with you, TYPO3 is not the most well known CMS platform around, many of our clients haven’t heard of it before we introduce them to it, Whist other platforms such as Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla or Umbraco have all garnered well known names for themselves they all have pros and cons and many platforms were originally designed as blogs, portals or digital asset managers and have grown over time into content management systems.

Typo3 on the other hand was built in 1997 and has always been a built for purpose website content management system meaning it offers a powerful and mature website publishing environment that provides unrivalled levels of flexibility and scalability.

When comparing content management platforms against your specific feature list, most CMS platforms should fare 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 and functions are implemented. This is where TYPO3 really stands out from its contemporaries.

Well established

Firstly, TYPO3 is very well established. There are currently over 230,000 active websites running TYPO3 and with that comes a large library of powerful extensions. TYPO3’s  extension architecture allows you to radically extend functionality. 

There are over 20,000 extensions catering to almost any need including blogs, polls, search, social integration, news feeds, video integrations and many more. Uniquely, extensions can be applied to the core CMS application, ensuring functionality can be extended without compromising future CMS upgrades, and that’s a big deal for a large and growing website.

Scalable

Next up let’s talk about TYPO3’s ability to scale. With its logical folder and file structure all TYPO3 websites are built with scalability in mind. 

At Liquid Light we like developing lasting relationships with our clients and we have many websites that we have grown and maintained for many years. Again the extension architecture is a key factor for this and allows new features and functionality to be easily added to a growing website.

workflow & staging

When it comes to maintaining enterprise level websites staging and workflow functionality is essential and TYPO3 has you covered. TYPO3 workspaces provides a mature and robust set of staging & workflow capabilities. Editors can work on multiple draft versions of a website, providing draft links to team members who can preview the content, enabling content to be published through different workspaces into the live website.

Multi site

When it comes to larger organisations it’s not uncommon for a business to have multiple websites, perhaps for different brands or products or areas of business. 

TYPO3 has amazing multisite capabilities allowing you to keep all of your different sites under one install. 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. 

The advantages to this approach are clear, less administrative overheads, easier maintenance and better integration between sites. One of our larger clients has a family of 18 websites all at their fingertips within a single TYPO3 installation.

Multi lingual

Another area that TYPO3 really excels is its multilingual functionality. Whilst most platforms require aftermarket plugins to deliver multilingual content TYPO3 has it built in directly out of the box. This robust functionality allows for both parity and non parity approaches to multi-lingual websites giving totally flexibility to how you translate your content.

One of our favourite capabilities is TYPO3’s ability to bulk export and import xml content, to and from translation agencies. When it comes to larger websites this dramatically speeds up the translation process saving time and money.

Security & version control

Lastly, but by no means least is security. Of utmost importance to enterprise and 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.

Another essential aspect of any enterprise class CMS is Version control, allowing you to roll back to earlier versions of content whilst 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.

Wrap up

So that’s why we love using TYPO3 and often find it the most appropriate CMS solution for many of our clients websites.

If you’d like to find out more about our approach to developing websites using TYPO3 or if you have questions then please get in touch, we are always happy to discuss our process and would love to work with you on your own TYPO3 website.

This article was posted in Development, TYPO3 CMS by Will Chidlow

  • Will Chidlow

    Will Chidlow

    Our Designer and in-house video expert Will enjoys the finer things in life; great coffee, exciting tech and creating pristine designs. The epicentre of Liquid Light - Will always has a tale to tell. Check out his YouTube channel