Forum Moderators: phranque
For example, I think typo3 allows you to output static html files, not sure about plone, which in terms of server load obviously would make a huge difference on a large site.
I was debating with a friend about the relative merits of using CMS systems, and thought I'd ask if anyone has some concrete feedback, based on experience, with either of these two. Questions are: ease of use, code validation, performance, stability, update and upgrade difficulty, etc.For example, I think typo3 allows you to output static html files, not sure about plone, which in terms of server load obviously would make a huge difference on a large site.
Hiya,
Disclaimer: ymmv. I haven't got enough Plone exprience to really talk intelligently about it. Been working with Typo3 about two and a half years.
As far as I know, from the developer standpoint neither Typo3 nor Plone is especially easy to learn to use. Typo3, I can say from experience, is very powerful, but this makes it somewhat difficult to learn. The interesting thing though, compared to every single other cms I've used (whether open source or proprietary), is that, once you have learned how to use the system effectively, there are very few occasions where you have to say to a client "we can't do that with this tool." Extension development for Typo3 can also be very quick.
Validation of code from Typo3 is basically up to the developer; there are comparatively few places where the CMS inserts its own html, and of the places where it does, there is exactly one instance where the code will not validate to xhtml 1.0 transitional. Having worked around a lot of CMS tools, I can hardly stress this highly enough: 99% or more of the html output from Typo3 is completely customizable by the developer (i.e. without modifying the source).
All I can really say about the application's performance is that I have no complaints. It needs a decent webserver though, no doubt about it.
With respect to stability and upgrades, my experience has been that, once everything is correctly configured once, it all just works. On a *nix server, upgrading is effectively a two-step process: 1. change a symlink from the old source to the new, 2. update the database. That's it.
Incidentally, Typo3 does not yet generate static pages (yes, I know it says this in various places; I don't know why...) What it does have though is a sophisticated caching system which means that pages without dynamic content are effectively static.
Based on my limited experience, Plone seems like a tool that could be really powerful too. My one complaint is that it seems to impose a lot of css files on to a site; but this might simply mean that I didn't know how to get rid of them properly...
I don't know whether this indicates a limitation of the application or not, but I have noticed that many Plone-based sites look very similar to each other. This is not the case with Typo3. Anything you can do with HTML/CSS in the first place can be done with Typo3.
-B
Thanks for clarifying on the caching versus static, that's right, my friend used the term caching, I just forgot that.
"Anything you can do with HTML/CSS in the first place can be done with Typo3."
That's good to know too, that's something that worried me about using a CMS, losing the ability to do true page customization.
I should have been more specific, by ease of use I meant ease of use in terms of adding new content for end users, the setup stuff doesn't worry me much.
