7 Comments

1. 
   Michael Cannon, February 5, 2009:

   Thank you for the comparison presentation. I’d suggest adding some headers to your Drupal and TYPO3 columns.

   A few concerns.

   An item that seems to be missing is the fact that TYPO3’s TemplaVoila templating engine allows for near plug and play when swapping templates if they’re consistent. Take a look at the Web Empowered Church template series. You can move between nearly two dozen templates without effort.

   Another item that seems to be missing is that a TemplaVoila template can be completely HTML and CSS based. That’s all what design needs to be worrying about.

   For the Drupal sub-templates, that’s something you can recreate quite readily also with the TVs Flexible Content Elements which will let you create the sub-templates from a normal template.

   Considering Srijan is a TYPO3 provider as well, the bias seems quite unfair.

   Michael

2. 
   Dmitry Dulepov, February 5, 2009:

   Well, I would not agree to some points. Portability is not a problem at all in TYPO3 (use export/import, very easy). Subthemes exist in TYPO3 if you mean different templates for different pages. TS is difficult, yes, but PHP is even more difficult for designers. So everything depends on your views.

3. 
   ssrahman, February 7, 2009:

   Yeah the presentation surely needs some brushing up.

   TYPO3 does allow for near plug and play if the templates are consistent, but it’s also a fact that not too many contributed themes/templates exist for TYPO3 whereas drupal.org has a list of close to four hundred themes . Given this empirical evidence I conclude that Drupal themes are more portable . And more flexible too. Drupal allows users to make a whole lot of changes (colors, logos, etc.) to the installed theme without much fuss through a simple form, if the theme developer has implemented the necessary interfaces.

   I would disagree that TV templates are purely HTML and CSS based, we need a lot of TypoScript as well. And the TV mapping, and TS etc., also require a careful understanding of the underlying concepts COs etc. But from Srijan’s perspective, people investing time to learn PHP is far beneficial in the long run since we are primarily a bunch of developers.

   With Drupal one can create a derivative of an existing theme, this is what I refer to as sub-theming, and it’s a really powerful feature. I can, for example, take a contributed theme and change specific aspects (how a particular node or content element is rendered etc.) of it by overriding them in my sub-theme.

   The purpose of this presentation is not to discredit TYPO3 in any way, it’s about things which I feel are better. TV/TS does attempt to provide the ideal solution of keeping the designer/themer away from PHP, but in the process it adds certain layers of abstractions which don’t appeal to me. Though at the same time it might be working wonders for others, the point isn’t to show that templating in TYPO3 doesn’t work. So perhaps the bias isn’t that unfair.

4. 
   Felix, April 3, 2009:

   Hi,

   I think the main problem is mentioned on page 6: “Drupal themers are good coders”.

   Are they? I think to write a template in PHP is not more or less difficult then to write a template in TS for a non-coding screendesigner.

5. 
   Cenotaphe, August 23, 2009:

   “TYPO3 does allow for near plug and play if the templates are consistent, but it’s also a fact that not too many contributed themes/templates exist for TYPO3 … ”
   I kindly disagree … the fact that with templaovilà, typo3 is purely HTML and css based for the templates, that means your template library is the Whole Wide Web …
   The way I work with the people I make websites for, is they drop me a psd file of what they want, and then I build the html page that is imported into templavoilà … setting a basic browsing site with url rewriting and all the nice typo3 functions usually takes me about 4 to 5 hours.
   I cannot imagine a more perfect system in terms of flexibility and completeness
   Cheers

6. 
   Richard, August 31, 2009:

   I have to say, the author seems to have no actual experience with TYPO3, or possibly barely enough experience to give up before learning how to work with the templating system.
   TYPO3 templates are simply HTML, an implementer would then take the template and map its content in place.

7. 
   kuldev, September 1, 2009:

   Hi

   I like this debate. I have worked on both TYPO3 and Drupal.But I like Drupal more than TYPO3 as an implementor,for the very simple fact that theming in Drupal is easier and less complicated.
   Templating in Typo3 means mapping,creation of FCEs rather than simple templates and blocks.
   For CSS,addition of a new css file is done through TypoScript(TS) and most of the HTML generated by the templates isnt enough to write better CSS.
   Basic neccessities of a site like menus and column structure etc require an awful lot of time to be incorporated into using TS.
   Moreover everything is stored in a database;all mappingsa and FCEs and are all stored in a database which could prove fatal both in terms of security and versioning.

   On the other hand Drupal provides easy and intuitive templating structure.
   The autogenerated HTML from the Drupal Views and other modules makes it easier for the theming guy to write better CSS.
   No mapping and TS necessary to be learnt which in essence means a beginner can learn and understand and of course start deploying Drupal much faster than Typo3.