Brave GNU World

[Christoph Neuroth]

On Thursday 26 January 2006 14:22, MJ Ray wrote:
> http://www.optaros.com/wp/wp_5_cms_report.html
Interesting report :) However (while I still haven't read it in total) I don't 
know why they judge typo3-community as "average", it's the best CMS community 
I've seen out there :) Very active mailing lists, nice IRC channel plus 
several forums on the net.

> In general, I share the preference for xhtml+css generation
> when possible. If it's good xml, it's a good exit safeguard.
We sure all do ;) But this can be done via bjoerns scripts as well as via 
typo3. To give you guys an impression of how powerful typo3 is, here is a 
test-version [1]. This site was done yesterday in not much more then four 
hours including:
 * Typo3 installation
 * Writing HTML/CSS template
 * Integrating it to typo3
 * multilanguage-versions with nice flagged language selector (could be turned 
to the old-fashioned text-links by setting one option, but I kinda liked 
it ;))
 * two-level accessible menu (lists instead of table! tables are evil!)
 * search-engine friendly links (well, partly - neet to get the language thing 
in there but that isn't going to be a problem)

Now all you need to do is some copy&paste and you can use the old data with 
the links and formatting (only had to replace the "<column at gnu.org>" to fix 
XHTML validity) - I have done it to the "Introduction" and three translations 
(couldn't do japanese translation as I don't see how I can make my browser 
output JP characters ^^).

And this installation is a clean, very extensible solution. If in some months 
we think another GNU subpage could profit from a CMS, we could just port it 
in there with very few efforts.

So what are the advantages of using a specialized script as Bjoern plans to 
do? I see:
 * Less server load (no script on the webserver)
 * better security (again: no scripts on the server)
 * any more?

Advantages I see in my approach:
 * Easily extensible to other pages because it only uses standard techniques 
and is not specialized on the sepcific task of braveGW.
 * can have builtin search functionality
 * has builtin user-management, logging/versioning (diffs) and workflow 
features if needed
 * is very well tested. while I trust your script-hacking expertise, bjoern, 
experience teaches us that you *will* encounter bugs. typo3 runs tens of 
thousands of websites very reliable [2]
 * content is absolutely separated from design -- new "corporate identity" for 
GNU? no problem! just develop the new template, remap it, and use the old 
content!
 * It has some accessibility extensions that can generate for example 
accesskeys and <dfn> tags for the menus or <ABBRV> tags which can help people 
with disabilities that can't use a mouse or need a screenreader.

regards, Chris

[1] http://tanja.delmonico.de/typo3/ (might be down sometimes and its very 
slow - 266MHz and a 14kbps upstream ;))
[2] see some of them here: http://typo3.com/Customers.1229.0.html