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Building websites with TYPO3

Buy this book from Amazon UK or Amazon DE (gives me couple of cents if you buy from this site)

What is the most common opinion about TYPO3? What can you here in 90% cases when you ask about TYPO3? That it has a steap learning curve. That it is complex. That it takes much time to learn.

Generally TYPO3 documentation is rated high. But people often do not like to read documetation online. They prefer printed books. Fortunately, recently Packt Publishing released several books about TYPO3. I own all of them. Review for one was posted several months ago and now there is another.

The book we are looking in at this review is called "Building websites with TYPO3" with a subtitle "A practical quide to getting your TYPO3 website up and running fast". It is written by Michael Peacock and its text is internally reviewed by Ingo Renner, a member of core team.

So, the title suggests that this book is for beginners. Does it fulfil its purpose? Let's see.

The book consists from eight chapters. Here is how they are called:

  1. Introduction
  2. Installing TYPO3
  3. Administration Overview
  4. Setting up the site
  5. Front-end features
  6. User management
  7. Site administration
  8. Extending TYPO3

So far, so good. Seems like beginner can get all he needs. I tried to look to this book from he beginner 's view.

Book starts from general words about TYPO3. This chapter takes 12 pages, which is not much. I was a bit surprised to see words about sponsoring there (which are not applicable to this book at all because expecting donations from the beginner is a bit strange). But I found also many good references, so my overal impression about this chapter was neutral. I went to the next looking for something practical.

Chapter 2 starts from system requiremenets for TYPO3. This topic is a bit obscure because there are no official document that describes these requirements. Michael Peacock recommends at least 256MB of RAMand 1GHz CPU, which is quite low in my opinion to really work with TYPO3. TYPO3 is very resource hungry (c'mon, it is enterprise-level CMS!), so I would says at least 512MB RAM is recommended (and faster CPU).

Then chapter talks about using Windows installer for TYPO3. While it is good for starting, it is not practical for real life. I found that learning the system installation properly from the beginning is very essential for future because if one designed a habbit to use simple and fast way instead of more complex but better way, it is really hard to get rid of such habbit. So if I were in Michael's place, I would not describe Windows tutorial at all but woud explain in all possible details how to properly use TYPO3 source and dummy packages. This is very essential because many people do it incorrectly and later have serious troubles with upgrades. But sadly there is no such information in the book. It is not really difficult and quite fast. So I am not sure why it is not there.

Then Install tool is described well enough for beginner (no more, no less is needed). However the chapter lacks several small tips on tuning PHP for TYPO3 (some settings, eAccelerator, etc). May be they should not be described in details but I would at least mention them.

Next chapter talks about administering TYPO3. And here I, as a beginner, was lost.

It is a difficult task to introduce a beginner to TYPO3 backend (this is where all editing happens). TYPO3 backend is very feature rich, there are many icons, frames, texts. All is there and all is clear for experienced user. But for beginner... Imagine yourself in a Boeing cabin. Got lost? Yes if you are not a pilot. Same for TYPO3 BE.

I myself have no idea how can I describe BE for beginner. And I did not see anything good on this topic yet. I have to say that Michael tried but stillit would be hard for beginner to understand what he has to do with it all.

Chapter describes each module one by one but it does not give any idea what user should do step by step. This is what normally beginners need. As soon as they are already a bit experienced, this chapter will become very valuable for them. But absolute novice will most likely skip this chapter because there are too many details in it. Too many for novice user.

Next chapter talks about setting up a TYPO3 site. When I was a beginner (there were no any books in ENglish), I tried various ways to set up a site with TYPO3. There are at least three possibilities: writing TypoScript manually, using templates with markers and using TemplaVoila. I tried all and found TemplaVoila's point-and-click interface the most easy. Now TemplaVoila is far more convinient than any other temlating method and far more rich with features. And I strongly believe that TemplaVoila is the easiest way for beginners to quickly start with TYPO3.

Unfortunately this chapter (as the whole book) does say anything about TemplaVoila. But it described in details (ten pages!) old obsolete and deprecated templates that were in TYPO3 for ages and most likely will be removed in one of future versions. As a beginner I may not know about it, so I would study it. But as experienced TYPO3 user I would say that it is waste of time.

Than chapter describes content elements one by one, and it quickly reminded me previous chapter, which is good when user must be slightly more experienced to use this information as reference.

Chapter 5 goes into more details about creating pages and editing content. It covers all important details.

Chapter 6 talks about user management. Not a beginner's task but very good to know because not covered by TYPO3 tutorials. All details are described, also such importamt parts as access lists, how to use them and what are they for.

Next chapter goes into important questions about backup. It has a good starting information on using both command line and phpMyAdmin but I did not understand why costly commercial product (cPanel) is described there. To me it seems that this part of the book is taken from some internal tutorial (at least one section name says "Using our control panel").

This chapter also covers workflow built-in into TYPO3. I did not use it myself and was really pleased with information in the book.

Chapter 8 covers extension manager and several popular extensions. I would says that my personal choice of extensions would be different but this is really too personal. In any case Michael's choice is also good.

 

So, does this book serve its purpose? Is it really a quick start for beginners?

I would say that yes, beginner can quickly start using TYPO3 using this book. At the moment it is the fastest book that beginner can use to quickly learn TYPO3.

However this book does not teach user to use TYPO3 effectively from the beginning. It does not describe modern things and sometimes focuses on obsolete parts of TYPO3. But even with this obvious disadvantage, I would still recommend this book to those who is in real hurry to learn TYPO3. If one has time, he should probably use another book. But Michael Peacock's book is really good for quick start.

Buy this book from Amazon UK or Amazon DE (gives me couple of cents if you buy from this site)