I returned from my July 4 weekend today to an email from Simon Angling with a link to his current project. It proves conclusively that, with some hard work, TYPO3 does allow designers to produce standards compliant code.
Simon’s site is fast and light on its feet. I’m sure that he will share it with everyone when the project is ready to launch.
Thanks for dispelling my doubts about the capabilities of this CMS!
Upon receiving Simon’s email, I did some more thorough research and found a detailed tutorial on using TYPO3 to create standards compliant templates.
Related Posts
July 4th, 2005
On a close inspection of TYPO3, I have been impressed by how few design constraints it imposes upon content. My initial assessment of this CMS as inflexible and overly complex was wrong. While it is complex, it offers a range of web development paths, some with greater complexity than others.
Read the related posts below for more info.
June 6th, 2005
I was browsing for CMS information as I often do when I stumbled onto TYPO3 via this about.com article. Having looked at many CMS solutions in the past, I have become a bit skeptical about finding one ideal for small to mid-size businesses without paying a subscription fee (Two options are Live Storyboard and Site Worx) but I am hopeful that TYPO3 will be able to provide a back-end content management solution that allows flexible, standards compliant design integration on the front-end.
Some features my clients need are scalability, multi-language localization, design flexibility, and ease (speed) of development. On all these counts, TYPO3 claims it can deliver.
I would like TYPO3 pros to tell me if the CMS web site feature claims are an accurate reflection of the quality of this product and will begin testing it soon.
Related Posts
June 2nd, 2005
Though WordPress is still not a CMS robust enough for a large corporation’s needs, with the release of version 1.5 it is on the way. Now users can easily add pages as well as posts to their web site via the administrative interface. In fact, a new plug-in has taken Wordpress to the next level by emphasizing its CMS features. The Semiologic Theme includes features such as internationalization and automatically populated navigation menus. It looks like it may work well for small business web sites that need frequent updates to content by non-technical users.
May 26th, 2005
This is a continuation of my discussion regarding the CARP solution to RSS aggregation. I’ve concluded that the CARP solution is too limited for handling the character encoding I throw at it. The particular character-encoding problem I encountered was the substitution of a question mark for every apostrophe in the WordPress item title tag and I am not sure whether to blame the WordPress RSS feed or CARP. The reason for this inadequacy (as I see it) is that it does not handle ATOM feeds with their more advanced character encoding abilities. I have experimented with Magpie RSS and found it handles the ATOM feeds gracefully and that character encoding has not been an issue on my ATOM feeds.
The weakness of Magpie is its lack of advanced functions to format the cached feeds. This lack of pre-designed functionality is a strength because Magpie is designed with the PHP programmer in mind, allowing a great deal of control with a little knowledge of PHP. It also seems to load more quickly when the feed has not been cached, but this is based on an observation rather than benchmarks. Overall, I find that for my purposes Magpie is by far the best solution. For those with little or no programming experience, CARP offers a quick way to incorporate your WordPress posts throughout the rest of your web site, but Magpie will help you do it with fewer character encoding issues.
By the way, if you are wondering how to use the Magpie technology built into the latest version of Wordpress, check out Secrets of WP Theming: Part 3 by Chris Davis.
March 7th, 2005
Flexibility, Power, Open Source, PHP/MySQL
I am searching for a CMS that will allow me enough flexibility to design a front-end that does not look like a blocky portal, but also has enough power to provide events management, user control and private document delivery, and a tool to manage a substantial business directory grouped by category and subcategory. On top of all this, the tool I hope to find will be well documented enough to allow myself or another developer to extend the business directory table structure.
The kicker is that I believe strongly in standards compliant XHTML and CSS and want to develop on the PHP/MySQL platform. Few good CMS systems generate standards compliant code even if they have the flexibility I desire.
Some of What I’ve Found
To contribute something to others in my predicament, I’ll list some of the excellent tools I have found in my research:
CMS Made Simple is relatively lightweight completely open source and free. It also clearly separates CSS and XHTML presentation and content.
Xaraya is a hybrid XML/PHP content management system that looks very flexible and seems to have a strong developer community. I’m interested in learning more about it.
CMSimple looks ideal for small to medium size business Web sites that need to manage pages as opposed to blogs and other interactive media. There’s a bit of a problem with content/presentation separation and the php code is a bit messy, so I’d use caution. If you are HTML savvy, you could check out the barebones, Quate CMS.
TYPO3 is a midsize CMS with enough complexity and as a result, flexibility, to adapt to diverse content needs. With some work, it will allow designers to produce standards compliant XHTML templates.
WordPress, with the release of version 1.5, is now a CMS capable of producing pages and blog posts. Though I doubt it has the power to push a large web site, it could easily handle a small web site’s content management processes. The best thing about WordPress is its incredibly easy to master templating/theming system that allows for almost unfettered creativity in design.
Etomite: free, easily customizable tool that generates valid code. I lean towards this tool because it is slim and easily customized. However, the events snippet does not generate valid code. Etomite does not have an adequate system for serving password protected content.
Mambo: free, powerful, and customizable tool that does not generate valid code … yet.
Drupal generates valid code and has an open and flexible templating system. I have not used it enough to be sure of the limits of its flexibility, but initial exploration is promising.
PHPWebsite: Open source, free content management tool that generates valid code. This is a real CMS with a great deal of power. However, I have not seen any good design work done with this CMS as the back end. In addition, I have not yet been able to determine if I will be able to develop the directory I need within its structure.
Related Web Sites
January 15th, 2005
Sooner or later, every web savvy organization faces the challenge of how to provide current content from many different sources while maintaining a unified look across their web site. The challenge is multiplied many times for each content provider an organization relies on as each person has different stylistic preferences and abilities.
Continue Reading December 28th, 2004
