It's Sunday afternoon...time for some fun: let's try out Typo3. Step one: Installation. For MacOSX you can download a pre-packaged 166MB archive from here. The installer just works fine and after some minutes a web-browser starts up with the installer UI. After clicking through the ten-step installation process I got the admin login...not bad so far. Step two: after login into the Typo 3 backend you will see a clean tree on the left with various options in one place (compared to various actions scattered around the Plone UI (which makes more sense to me)). With Typo 3 backend I tried to perform a simple task like adding a simple page. The main tree shows me three options: Page, View, List. Click on each options opens a secondary tree with obviously represents a default tree structure...hmmm...what's the difference between the three? no idea :-) Some how I got into the edit more for a page. Typo 3 seems to support out-of-the-box a page composition model (similar to CMFContentPanels or Collage). A standard page can be composed of different blocks and each block has its own configuration UI (comparable to the BernArticle implementation but implemented in a somewhat nicer way). Enough for today....some observation:

• the UI is pretty complicated and not directly intuitive
• the UI is overloaded with icons and little text
• the usability is not straight forward
• the Typo 3 backend feels a bit sluggish and slow (similar to old Plone 2.X versions) - Plone's inline editing mode is much faster to use
• the default page composition options are definitely stronger than what we have in Plone out-of-the-box (which raises the discussion if the editor needs a idiot-proof UI or requires a UI like in Typo 3 with many options).

That's it for now.