My relationship with TYPO3 was enforced, rather than chosen. In the beginning I couldn't think of anything more awkward than TYPO3, now I can't think of a product better suited to large scale CMS websites. Don't get me wrong; TYPO3 is not for all websites. In a lot of cases it is the worst tool for the job, but use it in the situations it was designed for and it is the best product by a stand-out mile.
There are three things you will need in order to conquer the power of TYPO3:
1) Time - and lots of it. A year to 18 months of working with it day to day before you really understand it's capabilities. This is for all level of developers. I have seen very experienced programmers and very junior programmers take roughly the same timescale to pick it up.
2) Patience - lots of that as well. Typoscript is an obtuse configurational language and each extension can add hundreds of new parameters which ar soon forgotten. While there is a standard template for manuals, the information quality in them varies widely.
3) Money – and lots of it. Yes, TYPO3 is open-source and free but it’s a massively complex system and takes a lot of time to learn. Someone must sponsor that time. Depending on your income the cost of training equates to between £20,000 and £100,000. Sounds a lot doesn’t it. Well it is. But this is enterprise software. I have used it as the backbone of projects with value in in excess of £1,000,000 with great success.
If you can get through these three barriers you are well on the way to becoming skilled in a very serious content management framework. I should re-iterate the patience part. The only reason I stuck with TYPO3 is because it was the system my previous employer favoured. If I had any kind of choice I would have used another system after the first few months. One day after this though, things just started to make sense. The learning curve is the deepest I have ever encountered, but the resulting knowledge is worth the effort in my opinion.
If anyone has any typoscript / typo3 questions feel free to comment on this blog and I will do my best to answer them. I am by no means an expert yet, but I now know enough to stop more of my hair going grey when I have to start a new website. Extension development, for example, is the next area I have to conquer. The kickstarter makes the extension creation process very simple but I need to learn all of the TYPO3 frameworks in-built functionality. For this I am going to wait until TYPO3 V5 comes out as this is not too far off and has a completely rewritten backend.
