Pocket Revolutionary

A CMS (Content Management System) is always a consideration when you’re starting to design a large or often updated site. My personal favorite is Typo3 because of the many ways I’ve seen it modified and even because I really agree with the philosophy of the founder, Kasper. One place where the CMS isn’t considered enough, though, is in the small 5-6 page site. I have three reasons from my personal experience that I’d recommend at least considering a CMS like Typo3 for even the smallest sites.

1. Faster design templating. It’s taken for granted now that it’s easier & faster to update a large site with templates of some kind. The problem comes in, though, when you look at how the template engine from many systems fits into your workflow. Many engines assume you want to start by building a template from scratch that will follow their proprietary rules, but that just doesn’t fit with the fastest workflow in most cases. Your workflow probably involves an example page for yourself, your boss, or your client complete with temporary content designed in a WYSIWYG or graphical editor (Dreamweaver, GoLive, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.). Unfortunately, to build a template from this you need to either painstakingly modify your source by hand or simply start with a pre-existing template and just modify it to “match” your needs. To be honest, this doesn’t scale if you’re only using that template five times. The TemplaVoila engine in Typo3 changes this, though. Kasper shows here how quickly you can take a fully-functional HTML/CSS example page and turn it into a working CMS template for Typo3. How does this apply to your small site? If you’re building a quick site, you don’t want to spend all your time turning your idea into a template, but if you can go from design to template in 10-15 minutes, then you have saved yourself real time even for a small number of pages.

2. Extensibility. This is pretty much a necessity today in the rapid development environment. The web today recognizes the sites that can grow and adapt quickly to changes. There is almost no feeling as miserable as the last-minute feature requests that make you rethink the entire scope of a project two days before launch. At the same time, there’s a special joy near the end of a development cycle when you or a client think of that final feature and you know that you have the architecture in place to support it. In the last few months, I’ve had one small site (that will be launching soon) where the owner requested a special “clients only” environment in the final stages (I just had to add some extensions to the existing Typo3 structure) and another small site that I thought could use an RSS feed for updates (I just had to add some functionality to their Typo3 system). Even though the sites started out small and stayed small in page size, the ability to add intelligent features like newsfeeds and logins saved hours of rework and gave them genuinely useful features.

3. Pre-Launch Workflow. Once again, if you’re looking at a big site then you’ve already thought of the maintenance benefits in the long run when using a CMS. The pre-launch and development workflow is why I use Typo3 on every site except for a few, though (Wordpress and Mediawiki are sill irreplaceable). Using Typo3 from the beginning gives a clear separation of content, design, and extended functionality. I’ve managed to create a very fluid process of parallel development this way. As soon as I complete the first draft of the templates, content can start being added by others. Then, while they’re adding content, I can finalize the template or work on implementing extended features like calendars, image galleries, etc. Even if we completely change the direction of the template, their work on adding content is not lost and the site is moving forward while we’re working out the last details.

This isn’t a list of everything great about CMSes or anything truly revolutionary for most web developers, honestly. It’s just three of my own reasons for using a complete CMS like Typo3 on a site, no matter what the original scope of the site is. Even if you’re building a site that will only be up two months for a promotional campaign, I know some amazing designers who will use Typo3. CMSes are easily available and can really improve the initial development phase on so many projects that I would reconsider if you’re not using them more. I know I never understood the guys who used a “complex” system for every site until I ran into the need for a template workflow, last-minutes features, and projects delayed waiting for content to be added.

By the way, I don’t plan on writing every piece of text on this site, so don’t worry. There’s plenty of more experienced writers and developers out there that I respect, so I’ll link to them as new things come across my newsfeeds (I use Vienna on my Mac).