Since more than 10 years I've been using TYPO3 CMS to create websites, I'm an active community member, I've published extensions, I've contributed to the TYPO3 core and popular extensions.
As a TYPO3 guy I can't understand why it is not the world's most used and loved CMS. 😉
So I challenge you to bash TYPO3 as good as you can. For me it doesn't matter if you have just heard rumors about how bad TYPO3 is or if you have actually worked with it. If you have hard feelings about my favorite CMS please share them with me in the comments.
Maybe I will try to defend TYPO3 against your criticism, I will definitely learn from it.
Top comments (8)
You can find a few different projects that claim to get you started with TYPO3 within minutes - and most of them actually work.
However you have a point there. I'm still wondering what's the right way to set up TYPO3 for local development and deployment and I've found myself doing it slightly different in each of the last websites that I've started. I'd love to see a bit more standardization and good tutorials in that area.
I can't agree on the maintenance part - I think its quite straight forward. Since TYPO3 is composer based you can just run
composer updateto update TYPO3 and the installed extensions. Upgrade wizards and the new extension scanner help you with major upgrades that are released every 1.5 years.No bashing of TYPO3, I work with TYPO3 everyday, we run several websites and portals using it. But sometimes I get really annoyed that breaking changes occur on the patch level. I also have to say that it is hard to maintain, especially if you want to upgrade to the next LTS. I see great benefits for bigger companys but I understand that it is not the first choice for individuals or small/medium companies.
I can't remember the last patch level change that was breaking and not security related. Which one do you mean?
Example: Form framework. Trying to update to v8.7.11 and finding out, that I have to adapt my own form elements to the changing field partial (typo3.org/article/typo3-8711-and-7...). You may say that this is a small change but for someone who just wants to update to the next patch without worries this is horrible. Hard to explain the extra work to someone else like my boss.
I'm also working with TYPO3 over 10 years now, which until v7 and v9 was a love-hate relationship. The entry-curve to learn and deeply understand the system is just very very high (compared to other systems), but that is nothing to complain about because of its amazing stability, flexibility and quality. Now (since v9) the core and the ext-dev improved so much that I mostly love it. But still the ext-dev is sometimes very frustrating and wasting hours of life-time because of strange errors, that is my biggest thing to complain about. Even in Dev mode, its super annoying to always clean the cache if you made changes in files like ext_localconf, but not for changes in TCA overwrites. Or why changes in models are applied immediately (without clearing cache), but if you change some annotations inside the model you have to clear the cache again, otherwise very strange reflection errors are thrown which are not helpful at all (I lost hours of my life tracking this down how to deal with this and what to do, or where the issue came from). So the workflow for extension development really need to be improved, to require less learn-from-try-and-error experiences for issues like the above.
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Could write endless more.
I've worked over 20 years with different and special CMS Version, from simple to hard - This is a large step back in 00 years.....
Bashing often has the disadvantage that it is very unspecific ("TYPO3 sucks" or "documentation is shitty") and is more often than not a problem of the basher and not the bashee (if that even is a word).
That being said: The documentation has improved a lot but I still sometimes find it hard to find information about pretty basic things. Also, a lot of people blog (instead of contributing to the official docs) and the official documentation is chronically neglected. This writing information as blogs is better than nothing because then you can find the information in the blog, but it makes it very fragmented. If you compare this with other open source projects, the documentation is better maintained and more people contribute.
On the bright side, there are some documentation pages I regularly refer to and they are well maintained and very helpful. In general it has improved a lot and you rarely find really outdated pages.