I am originally a software developer. I work with C++ and develop Windows applications that interface with exotic hardware or with databases. I’ve been doing that for over 20 years now. Just a few years ago, if someone had suggested I would also create webpages for a living, I would have thought him mad. I’d had one look at creating webpages with HTML and found it extremely tedious and time-consuming – as there was now proper way to re-use code or automate things properly.

About twelve years ago we were asked to promote a webpage on the Internet for my parents. This resulted in me getting better acquainted with the way things are found on the Net and how webpages can differ in quality. A friend told me about Content Management Systems and how they could help separate the content of a website from the HTML code that displays it and formats it. The idea sounded good I found this open source CMS that seemed to offer very many possibilities for adapting the output. This CMS was Typo3. It actually offers so many options, with its own programming environment TypoScript, that it took me months to be able to use it properly.

I’ve been creating Typo3 websites now for close to ten years and still think it is the best open-source CMS around. Even if I don’t quite agree with the way the new back-end is going. Typo3 permits full control over what will be output to the browser, even letting you decide to output different code for different browsers. As a database administrator I really liked the idea of having database driven output. To properly be able to use Typo3 though, it takes a lot of studying, as some of the options are not exactly intuitive and the documentation usually lets a lot to be desired.

But all in all I am glad we added Typo3 websites and Internet Promoting to the services we offer. On top of creating webpages for the Net we also use Typo3 to create database applications that run in standard browsers on multiple OS platforms – as opposed to the thick client applications we used to create for Windoze.