Review: Typo3 Enterprise Content Management

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Review: Typo3 Enterprise Content Management

updated by rck, 2005-09-19

I've been asked to review a book. It's called Typo3 Enterprise Content Management, it's about Typo3 and it contains a lot of information.

In this article, I'm trying to find out the focus of the book, the target audience and try to write a bit about its content, too.

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Looking at the content (foreword to ch. 2)

The foreword
For me, the foreword is the highlight of the book. Kasper Skårhøj first writes about the history of Typo3 and his own history. He began to study at the Technical University of Denmark 1997 and started a company with another student later on. He also teamed up with someone else to set up Superfish.com, a commercial approach to CMS. Later on, he left Superfish.com as it didn't work out the way he thought it would, taking the source code with him. He continues with “Reasons to Belive”, the current state of the TYPO3 community, credits and the TYPO3 community snowboard tour in 2004.

The foreword

For me, the foreword is the highlight of the book. Kasper Skårhøj first writes about the history of Typo3 and his own history. He began to study at the Technical University of Denmark 1997 and started a company with another student later on. He also teamed up with someone else to set up Superfish.com, a commercial approach to CMS.

Later on, he left Superfish.com as it didn't work out the way he thought it would, taking the source code with him. He continues with “Reasons to Belive”, the current state of the TYPO3 community, credits and the TYPO3 community snowboard tour in 2004.

Introduction (chapter 1)
Interesting: The book is actually based on the german version -- not the other way round. The history of Typo3 here is basically the same like in the foreword and one page long. There's another page about CMS (separation of content from layout, content lifecycle), the GPL (Typo3's licensing scheme), the Typo3 community and the Typo3 association.

Installation (chapter 2)
What amazed me in the table of contents was that the installation guide is a whole 50 pages long. But why? Let's find it out. The actual hardware- and software requirements are summed up in 5 pages, whereas the actual install-guide even includes php, MySQL and Apache installation on 15 pages. The next 21 pages are about config-variables. I'd prefer them to be in a separate appendix or look them up online, but well, tastes differ. Last but not least, there's a subchapter “Help with Problems”. What I didn't understand: Why does it point to http://bugs.typo3.com/ but not at a support site like http://typo3.org/? Most problems users experience are usually support questions, not actual bugs.

Installation (chapter 2)

What amazed me in the table of contents was that the installation guide is a whole 50 pages long. But why? Let's find it out.

The actual hardware- and software requirements are summed up in 5 pages, whereas the actual install-guide even includes php, MySQL and Apache installation on 15 pages. The next 21 pages are about config-variables. I'd prefer them to be in a separate appendix or look them up online, but well, tastes differ.

Last but not least, there's a subchapter “Help with Problems”. What I didn't understand: Why does it point to http://bugs.typo3.com/ but not at a support site like http://typo3.org/? Most problems users experience are usually support questions, not actual bugs.