An outside developer is suggesting I consider the Typo3 CMS as the back-end for all of my corporate websites.  Many years ago I looked at Typo3, but the complexity of the system for what I needed at the time was a bit more than I felt comfortable with. I'm taking a second look at it now and wondered if any Core members had experience with the platform, and if so what are your thoughts.

We looked at it long ago and thought is was crap. A toolbox with little to no tools in it, but it might have changed.

For a great CMS, if not Wordpress, then have a look at these good guys: http://www.composite.net/

I looked at a while back as well - it seemed like a high learning curve for minimal advantages versus other platforms. (But I'm not a big CMS fan or user.) Might have changed now.

It is a popular (and usually unnecessary) 'solution' from some German-language web developers for their clients.

(The cynic in me says it likely keeps them tied to an expensive Typo3 developer post-development versus cheaper and more widespread platforms.)

I'm in pretty much the same boat as everyone else here - looked at it years ago and it seemed unnecessarily complex for what it actually did.

I think it would depend on their pitch - what is it that T3 does that JoopalPress doesn't do?

If you can believe W3 Tech's data, Typo3 usage is flat, so it's not dying yet (as I would have assumed). Joomla's usage is also flat. Drupal and Wordpress are seeing continued growth. Drupal and vBulletin are the leaders in high-traffic sites, Wordpress in number of sites.

I think with open source, there's an advantage to a system that has upward momentum, but flat is probably OK too.

So the question I would have for the developer is why T3? What does it give you that more popular systems with larger dev bases don't.

http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all (click on individual CMSes for detailed views of market share and increase/decrease in installs).

Is Joomla not an option?

This is primarily for multilingual versions of one main site. Supposedly Typo3 is really good at handling those. I'm not sure why exactly, but that is what I am told. Also, it would be connecting a number of sub-sites for the public and some intranets, all the while recycling a lot of the product and corporate data throughout. Again, Typo3 apparently does this well.

The back-end needs to handle Japanese, Chinese and English at least. Other languages are of course a plus. I keep reading that this is a forte of Typo3.

I also hear a lot of people talking about the steep learning curve involved. I assume that would limit developers who are proficient at this CMS. Every time someone says Typo3 is dead in one of the forums another person comes along and says it's still going strong. It's confusing.

Thanks for that W3 Tech data. That will be good for me to use. Other platforms are not out of the question at this point, but Typo3 had been specifically brought forward as a good open source option. I just don't know anyone who actually uses it.

Looking at the list above take a/another look at Drupal.  If you are not put off by a steep learning curve it might as well be for a platform that is not only going to meet the criteria of that project, but is widely used, growing and massively flexible.

We're starting to move a lot of things we would have done in wordpress/proprietry software/e-commerce systems/bespoke in to drupal. The advantage of one platform for (almost)all is compelling to us.  Doing some drupal training at the moment as it happens.