Review: Typo3 Enterprise Content Management

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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About the structure
Looking into the book, one might notice that the backside-summary of it is pretty accurate. The answer to “What is a CMS” is a whole 2 pages long (the book itself has 595 pages) and there's no comparison to other CMSes. So we can rule out the decision makers. Still, the one page about the visible and hidden cost of Typo3 implementations is nice. We won't find any Typo3 reference sites either, nor does the book describe general content ideas. Like: How long should your articles be, how to structure them, how to market your site, how to design the navigation, how to do search engine optimizations, and so on. Let's have a closer look to the content table. 5 page foreword, written by Kasper Skårhøj (=the author of Typo3) 10 page introduction 50 page (!) install guide 68 pages editors-guide 64 pages admin-guide 202 pages about Typo-Script 14 pages about extensions 125 pages about extensions developement

About the structure

Looking into the book, one might notice that the backside-summary of it is pretty accurate. The answer to “What is a CMS” is a whole 2 pages long (the book itself has 595 pages) and there's no comparison to other CMSes. So we can rule out the decision makers. Still, the one page about the visible and hidden cost of Typo3 implementations is nice.

We won't find any Typo3 reference sites either, nor does the book describe general content ideas. Like: How long should your articles be, how to structure them, how to market your site, how to design the navigation, how to do search engine optimizations, and so on.

Let's have a closer look to the content table.

5 page foreword, written by Kasper Skårhøj (=the author of Typo3)
10 page introduction
50 page (!) install guide
68 pages editors-guide
64 pages admin-guide
202 pages about Typo-Script
14 pages about extensions
125 pages about extensions developement

Interpreting the structure

the content

What does that mean? To me, the message is rather clear. The book is written for technicans, who want to deploy a Typo3 site. They might be involved in supporting editors to get their content in and also in programming extensions themselves.

To underline this thesis, let's sum up the pages first.

445 pages are about stuff a regular user (or decision maker or webdesigner) will never need (50p install + 64p admin + 202p typo-script + 14p extensions + 125p extensions developement). That's about 75 percent of the book!