Experience.FellowshipOne.com

Hola!

We are at the stage where we need to get on with re-doing our website (www.leapoffaithministry.org) and have been looking longingly at Typo3. Anyone had any experience in using this over say Joomla/Mambo or Boast etc.?

It looks great but, it's something we need to hit the ground running on so time to "get to know it" is at a premium, I'd rather spend time designing a template lol!.

Any other possibilities for a LAMP based CMS?

Cheers :)

You may want to start with http://webempoweredchurch.com/ - they offer a package based on TYPO3 for free and it's supposed to be designed to get you up and running quickly.  If I remember correctly, Irving Bible Church is one of their users and had a pretty decent website design.

I've been investigating Joomla for our own church and it seems relatively friendly, but still quite a bit of work. There were some reviews on Open Source CMS software where TYPO3 wasn't getting very good press from some people as TYPO3 itself is more of a CM Framework.  The general developer response was that if it took so long to understand it and get up to speed, they'd rather build their own.  (Not something I necessarily agree with, but I can see where they're coming from.)  You can check out a bunch of open source CMS offerings at http://www.opensourcecms.com/

I'd probably investigate the WEC solution as something of interest and see how well it works.  They have a version you can download and try out.  You can also use something like XAMPP or even the Joomla Standalone Server as possibilities to try out Joomla locally.  I saw the Joomla just released their next beta - v1.5.  That may be worth playing with, but as they noted - not a good idea to deploy to a production site.

Let us know what you find out.  I'm sure others would like to know what you choose and why.

In Him,

-Peter 

Hi Peter It´s been a while. Anyway an update on our website - I bottled it and went with a remodeled Joomla site which I think works OK. Though I did cheat and hard coded the java menu (did not really have the time to dig into db enabling it). Had a play with XAMPP as well. On a side note, I am looking into twiki for a related project so will keep ya posted on how it goes. How are things with you? YiC

I think we're going to go the Typo3 route.  For some reason the overall package makes more sense in most areas than the other CMS's I looked at.  While I'm not crazy about the segregation of front-end/back-end in Typo3, the configuration for me was much more intuitive once I got over that hurdle.  Even for someone with my small programming background and even smaller web page development background, I was able to get things running pretty smoothly.  The community's been really helpful, too.  Just need to actually devote 15-30 minutes/day on redesigning the site now.  It was left in an unfinished state a while ago and has pretty much just been sitting there ever since.  :-(

In Him,

-Peter Schott
 

Peter,

Just a heads up. we just released a new sermons extension and 10 new templates. Also this year we are working on ways to edit pages much more easily. So, I think you will be pleased with your decision to go with TYPO3.

In Christ's Service,
Mark Stephenson
Director of Web-Empowered Church
http://WebEmpoweredChurch.com

Thanks, Mark.  I'd actually run across the new templates just before I saw this e-mail and had downloaded/installed them to play with them.  I settled on the one with the fly-out menu on the left as that seemed to work pretty well for the site I'm working on (except for cutting off some text - need to figure out how to handle that gracefully).  Still trying to figure out the whole logo thing, but I was able to quickly tweak some ACLs for a test members only site and give permissions to those new groups to Members/Staff and create a new area that met the needs for our admin team.  Still have to remove a lot of the Lorem Ipsum content and replace with our own, but it's shaping up pretty nicely.

I'm trying to do some basic layouts now and will post to the WEC forums on any major issues I'm having.  I appreciate your team's work on the package - it's made it a very church-friendly CMS.

-Pete Schott