TYPO3 is hard

Pastor Jeff Mikels blogs this week about the difficulty in trying to install/configure TYPO3 and the Web-Empowered Church (WEC) extensions. Read the comments and you'll see a response from Mark Stephenson.

In my opinion, TYPO3/WEC isn't to the point that it's easily adoptable by small or even medium-sized churches, unless they're unusally blessed with a gifted volunteer web developer. Early adopters will be high-tech churches of any size or very large churches like ours that have IT people on staff.

Having said that, WEC's goal (which we fully share and support) is definitely to make this usable by any church, anywhere. The technical barriers to achieving that goal are significant, but we're all working together to overcome them. I believe that those barriers will be overcome in time, with God's help. In the meantime, I would encourage any large or high-tech church to consider building/rebuilding their site in TYPO3 and to take advantage of the tools and expertise offered by WEC. The more of these early adopters we get involved in WEC, the faster we will be able to make the system work for the other churches.

I'm not speaking for Web-Empowered Church. I'm speaking from the point-of-view of the IT Director of a large church that is fully committed to WEC and its goals. God is doing something big here, and it's very exciting to be a part of it.