TYPO3 Talk with Gernot: Founder of TYPO3 Mask Extension

I think you heard from our well-known Extension “Mask”. This is our biggest project for the TYPO3 community. I'm a member of the TYPO3 education committee, offer TYPO3 training since 2009 and work exclusively with TYPO3 in my projects since 2004.

Oh, a company asked us in 2004 for a relaunch of their website. It should be implemented with a CMS called “TYPO3”. So we did that and we started to love TYPO3.

We are an association member to support the TYPO3-association financially. I spend a lot of time on the education committee and we maintain the Extension Mask.

This was a long time ago. I think this is very different today. Nowadays I would suggest hiring excellent employees or educate newbees well. Good quality is the secret for successful projects and satisfied customers.

In the last few years TYPO3 has grown into a CMS for large websites. It is built for multilingual, complex and extensive websites and web applications. This makes it possible to get great projects of prominent customers.

I think the main disadvantage of TYPO3 from the beginning is its bad usability for customers/editors. Modern possibilities and technologies should not only be available for developers.

In my opinion WordPress is optimized for small websites with a quick setup. It doesn’t focus on quality, security and individual designs and functionality. Thus they reach a large number of ‘discount websites’. TYPO3, however, is the opposite. It catches the great, exciting and interesting projects. Of course, there are not so many. This results in that statistics. Try to compare the working hours or budgets, then it will possibly switch.

I’m not familiar with other CMS and their ecosystem. But I know that TYPO3 has a great community and it makes fun to work with.

This is a very difficult and long way. I think this needs some different things like presentations on international events, education of newbees, being more user friendly and catching big players who can spread TYPO3.

Your Blog! Hopefully you keep writing your interesting articles for a long time!

The possibility to expand TYPO3 with extensions. So you can use a lot of existing functionality from the community or develop your specialized solution.

Visit TYPO3 events! You can talk to great people, find new friends and get new ideas for your work.

I like the mountains - in winter and in summer, sport in a lot of variants and gardening with cooking my own vegetables.