TYPO3 vs WordPress – Choosing Right Platform as Content Editor!

Are you trying to decide between TYPO3 vs WordPress to build your website? Being a non-technical person there's always a concern about which platform is easier and feasible to use as a content manager. While TYPO3 and WordPress are the most popular website builder in the world,

TYPO3 vs WordPress – Choosing Right Platform as Content Editor!

TYPO3 Vs WordPress as Content Manager

Are you trying to decide between TYPO3 vs WordPress to build your website? Being a non-technical person there's always a concern about which platform is easier and feasible to use as a content manager

While TYPO3 and WordPress are the most popular website builder in the world, we've compared them covering all the aspects that a content editor needs to consider. Our hope is that with this TYPO3 vs WordPress review and comparison, you will be able to decide which platform is right for your needs. 

So grab a large cup of coffee and get started with the article!

Let’s get started with Basics: TYPO3 & WordPress

General Differences affecting website building

Before we dig deep into the technical and content management experience level factors, here are some basic points to consider.

#1 Price

Both CMS are open source, which means you can use it for free.

#2 Best Suitable for

Both CMSs are best in their business but,

#3 Requirement of technical knowledge

#4 User Interface Experience

Note: For the brief about TYPO3 Vs WordPress please take a look at our Blog - https://nitsantech.com/blog/typo3-vs-wordpress-which-cms-is-good-for-my-business

Content Editing Experience

Here are some of the list of differences in the content management methods of TYPO3 and WordPress.

CMS Backend Screens

#1 Dashboard

#2 Manage Pages & Content

For TYPO3, all configurations are mostly self explanatory and can be found at one place.

Themes

#1 Theme Concept

#2 Child Themes concept

This feature is almost the same in both the CMSs. You can have one base theme and structure and can have a child theme that uses the basic configurations of the Parent-Theme and have a new layout in the child theme. 

#3 Edit Themes

To edit the template, one would need basic programming knowledge as an editor in both WordPress and TYPO3.

Page Structure

#1 Page Templates

#2 Backend Preview

#3 Grid Structure

Both  WordPress and TYPO3 doesn’t provide the Grid structure by default. So you have to depend on external plugins/extensions to make the CMS more flexible and structured in all kinds of layouts. 

#4 Save as Draft

In this segment both WordPress and TYPO3 are mostly similar. 

Editor Experience

#1 TYPO3 Content Elements Vs Gutenberg

There are a lot of things to find the difference between the TYPO3 content Elements and Gutenberg. But here we can explain the major graphical and working experience between both of them.

#2 Text Editor

#3 Full Page Editing experience

If you compare the full page editing experience of WordPress with TYPO3 then the editor may feel that editors are not able to edit the whole page at once, but only single content elements. 

Hence the editors have to switch the elements in order to edit them. However this problem can be solved using the frontend editing extensions.

Multi Language Capability

This is the most important part for any content management system and WordPress has backstep. 

Media/File Management Module

User Access & Permissions

If you are just a blogger and handle the content individually you don’t require a user access permissions module that much. But if you want to have a proper CMS and have multiple users to the site to manage the content you will require a good user permissions module. 

Just checkout the following images which gives you an idea how in depth you can give access permissions to particular users or any group.

Ways to extend default features

#1 Plugins/Extensions

Both CMSs have a large number of Add-ons as readymade plugins, extensions, themes both free and plugins.

#2 Custom Elements/Components

You can extend fields, elements or components for your desired CMS in both ways with free plugins or custom component/element development.

#3 FrontEnd Editing

In this segment also both CMSs don't have a default feature of frontend editing experience. But considering the demand for frontend editing experience the active members of both CMSs have developed some great plugins for this. 

#4 SEO

For better performance, the website’s SEO scores should be high. 

Both CMSs give you some intermediate level functions to improve your SEO. However, there are also free and paid extensions such as Yoast SEO available to improve SEO score.

From Developer perspective

If you have already selected any CMS then you also have to consider that if you need any developer’s help then how much a CMS can offer to customize anything based on your need. So I have listed a few points for that.

#1 Templating

#2 Extendable

#3 Rich Install Tool

TYPO3

TYPO3 provides a rich level of configurations and settings. You can manage the different kinds of configurations like Cache, Language packs, extension configurations, installation configurations etc...You can realize there are a lot of settings and configurations to manage & customize the site in whatever way you want to have it.

WordPress

The WordPress by default doesn’t provide advanced configurations. It has basic configurations like date and time, country selections etc… 

#4 Security Audit Trail

Administrators have access to one log in the backend or individual logs on each page where they can view changes that have been made to the database for both CMS. Those can be rolled back to previous changes by clicking the history brush.

#5 Robust Extensions

TYPO3 is extendable in a true manner. Even extensions can be extended. From any of the small corners from the TYPO3 you can extend any method from a class due to it’s great structure. TYPO3 has a great, very modern Extbase framework to develop any extension. One can find the list of extensions directly from the community, See here.

Features that aren't provided by WordPress but TYPO3 does

Here, I would like to mention those features that WordPress doesn’t provide but TYPO3 provides by default. As TYPO3 is a proper CMS tool

#1 Workspace

If your site has a wide range of pages and a lot of content and to manage them you have a huge team then you can set up this great feature of the TYPO3 WorkSpace. This is a Simple workflow or a lifecycle that you can set up and make sure every change done by an editor must be approved by a reviewer. 

With the custom workspace you have a lot of benefits like Safety, Transparent versioning, Previewing, Overview of changes, Flexibility etc...

#2 History / Undo

One can undo their changes back to its original states. To be able to undo the deletion of an element, you will need to use the History/Undo for the entire page. This option will open up the Rollback function, listing all changes made to the page. 

#3 Logs

There is an area in the TYPO3 backend which shows the list of actions, errors as Log, changes etc... This can help the administrator to review the changes in any content/element. Admin can determine who did the changes. It also logs the Login & Logout details of the users. So from this the Admin can review who logged in, at what time and what changes he had done. 

#4 Copy/Paste (Content elements, records etc)

May be the WordPress has introduced the Copy/Paste elements recently but TYPO3 provides this feature since years. You can copy and paste or add reference to any of the elements from one page to another page to reuse any of the elements. Also TYPO3 provides Copy/Paste the element as reference. This way you just have to change the content at one place and the changes can be applied to all the affected elements/content. This can save a lot of time.

#5 Forms

For any of the CMS creating different kinds of forms is a necessity. You should not depend on any 3rd party or external plugin. By default Wordpress doesn’t provide this basic form feature. 

Whereas TYPO3 provides Form management by default. So one can create an unlimited number of forms and can use them.

#6 Clipboard

Every time a record is copied in the TYPO3 CMS backend. TYPO3 provides access to its internal clipboard too. So you can put anything to the clipboard and at the same time you can also retrieve the information from it. It’s the core API so you can use and extend it to your custom extensions.

#7 Internal Search Engine

TYPO3 provides the search engine by default. It’s called Indexed Search. Indexing helps for HTML data priority, Word counting and frequency used to rate results, Exact, partially or metaphone search etc…And the search plugin helps Searching whole word, part of word, sounds like, sentence, language-sensitive based search and many more.

#8 LDAP/SSO Authentication (Backend and Frontend user authentication)

TYPO3 supports the LDAP authentication making TYPO3 a more secure CMS. TYPO3 LDAP/SSO Authentication enables import/update/deletion of users and groups (frontend, backend or both) from a LDAP-directory and provides Single Sign-On (SSO) for frontend users. These features make it the perfect choice when deploying TYPO3 as an intranet CMS

#9 User Management, Frontend Users & Login

As mentioned before in the WordPress it doesn’t provide that much when it comes to User management and role management. TYPO3 comes with a bunch of configurations, settings and features for the Roles, Users management, access permissions, Frontend users and default login module. So, for the very basic things you don’t have to be dependent on any 3rd party tool.

#10 Powerful Built-in Cache

Since TYPO3 CMS 4.3, one of the important parts of the TYPO3 is the data caching framework for better website speed. TYPO3 can cache the frontend content and pages. Along with the localization, system configurations, file cache, opcode related cache etc…

Conclusion

I have worked with both the CMSs in the past years. I can say that both CMSs are great in their business. 

Both CMSs can choose different types of content elements, frames, layouts, and even colors. Both content management systems have their pros and cons.

Then out of the two, TYPO3 is probably the best CMS for you. There are of course many other CMS's, with their own pros and cons, some of the most notable/popular also include Joomla, Magento, Shopify & Drupal. 

Basically: Both systems are aiming for totally different approaches to content management.

  • Gutenberg provides the editors with a frontend editing experience in the backend. The editor can focus solely on design & content without having to switch between different elements.
  • TYPO3 on the other hand primarily focuses on providing a clean and structured way for managing content with fully-fledged CMS functionality. The layout/design approach just isn’t as important. Still, the frontend editing extension enables the editing of content directly in the frontend.

Enjoy managing the content!

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