TYPO3 vs WordPress – Choosing Right Platform as Content Editor!

While TYPO3 and WordPress stand out as two of the most popular website builders globally, this article aims to provide a comprehensive comparison between these two great top open-source CMS platforms. By the end of the blog, you will be ready to make a decision on which CMS best suits your needs as a content editor.

• TYPO3  - Typically, TYPO3 is associated with higher implementation and maintenance costs. Its enterprise-level features and robust capabilities may require more investment, making it well-suited for larger organizations with significant budgets.
   
• WordPress - WordPress, being open-source, is known for its cost-effectiveness. While the core software is free, additional expenses may arise from premium themes, plugins, and hosting. Overall, WordPress is often more budget-friendly, especially for smaller businesses and individuals.

• TYPO3 - TYPO3 is best Suited for mid-sized to large enterprises, Government institutions and organizations with complex content management and scalability requirements. Its strength lies in handling extensive and multilingual websites with diverse content structures.
• WordPress - It is an excellent choice for individuals, bloggers, small businesses and even larger enterprises seeking a platform with widespread adoption.

• TYPO3- TYPO3's interface is feature-rich but may be considered more complex for beginners. Users with technical proficiency will appreciate the depth of customization and control available within TYPO3. But TYPO3 is easy to understand in terms of UI/UX, Design, and functionality.
• WordPress - WordPress is renowned for its user-friendly interface, making it accessible to users with varying technical skill levels. The platform's intuitive design and extensive community support contribute to its popularity among beginners. WordPress is Easy to use compared to TYPO3.

• TYPO3 - TYPO3 offers extensive customization options, allowing developers to create tailored solutions. This is an advantage for organizations with specific design and functionality requirements.
• WordPress - WordPress also gives customization options due to its vast library of themes and plugins. It enables users to seek both simplicity and the ability to customize their website.

Note: For the brief about TYPO3 Vs WordPress please take a look at our Blog - https://nitsantech.de/en/blog/migrating-from-wordpress-to-typo3-cms

TYPO3 enables precise and structured content control, offering a hierarchically organized page tree and modular content elements. Its Workspaces feature facilitates collaborative content editing.

WordPress, known for user-friendliness, features a straightforward page and post management system with the Block Editor for a more visual approach. Categories and tags enhance content organization.

#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.

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

#3 Grid Structure

Both WordPress and TYPO3 don’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. 

#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.

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

Both CMS platforms, TYPO3 and WordPress, offer a wealth of add-ons in the form of plugins and extensions. These ready-made solutions enhance functionality, providing users with the ability to easily integrate features, themes, and additional capabilities. The extensive libraries of free and premium TYPO3 plugins contribute to the versatility of both TYPO3 and WordPress.

Extending fields, elements, or components in your CMS is achievable through the utilization of free plugins or custom development. TYPO3 and WordPress provide flexibility for users to tailor their websites by incorporating custom elements or components, ensuring that the CMS can be adapted to meet specific needs.

While neither TYPO3 nor WordPress includes a default feature for frontend editing, both communities have responded to the demand for this functionality. Active members of both CMSs have developed plugins that allow users to edit content directly on the frontend, providing an improved and more intuitive user experience.

High SEO scores are crucial for optimal website performance. Both TYPO3 and WordPress recognize the importance of SEO, and users can enhance their sites' search engine visibility through various plugins and extensions.

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.

• TYPO3: Utilizes TYPO3 Fluid, a powerful templating engine, emphasizing separation of content and presentation.
• WordPress: Relies on PHP-based templates, known for simplicity and ease of use.

• TYPO3: Strong extensibility through well-defined extensions, accessible via the TYPO3 extension repository.
• WordPress: Relies on plugins for extendability, with a centralized directory showcasing a diverse array of options.

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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…

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!