An advanced content management system such as TYPO3 is the ideal basis for a community site - provided you don't have to set it up yourselves from scratch.

1. Content can be added by people with normal clerical skills,  working on-line with forms and word-processors - the sort of things they will be used to if they have ever worked with any computer system.
2. They don't need to know anything about the underlying code, any more that the average user of a Word Processor needs to know how to programme it.
3. What you write today can be available to anyone in the world, or to the group you choose, at the click of a button.
4. TYPO 3 runs on a web server, and can be contributed to by anyone with access to an internet connection from anywhere in the world.
5. Pre-existing content can be integrated easily.
6. If like most voluntary organisations you are swamped with descriptions of your work - mostly produced for publicity or grant applications -you can leverage the work you have already done to provide much of the site content. Your initial content will mainly be a matter of cutting and pasting what you have already.
7. People contributing content to the site do not need any specialised software. TYPO 3, working through an internet browser, provides everything that is needed.
8. If contributors prefer, text, particularly, can be edited in any word processor and copied and pasted into the CMS (though the interface that TYPO3 provides is in fact easier to use than the average word processor).
9. While in principle anyone could contribute content, there is a system of permissions, previews and approvals to guard against spam and other malicious and/or destructive activity, and to allow you to develop and view new and current pages in the background before publication.
10. Virtually no change in TYPO3 is irreversible. Changes are recorded in a log, and can be rolled back individually.
11. You can publish in multiple languages and users can switch between them.
12. You can change the whole look and feel of your site just by changing the (x)HTML templates. You could start out with a standard design, allowing you to concentrate on content and function, and replace it later with one more suited to your group identity.
13. Your designer only requires design skills and software; TYPO 3 can work with any design.
14. Through extensions TYPO3 supports features such as on-line shops, forums, polls, newsletter distribution, blogs and WiKis, job adverts and directories which provide the means to create and empower communities.
15. TYPO3 is highly standards-based, and provides the means to make your web site accessible.

We discuss the general principles behind web-based content management systems here and TYPO3 specifically here  The corporate/evaluations site for TYPO3 is here, and the technical web site is here.