15/06/04
37Textpattern migration
You made it! Were there any casualties? Is everyone else here?
To keep you on your toes, I’ve changed all my urls yet again. As hinted at in a previous entry, I’d decided to look into other CMS options that would give me better speed with no chugging (waiting for rebuilding). I tried out Pivot, Drupal, b2Evolution, Wordpress and Expression Engine, but in the end, Dean Allen won me over. Hicksdesign is now powered by Textpattern, instead of Movable Type.
I’m bound to get a lot questions as to why I didn’t decide on the trendy switchers choice – Wordpress. Its a fantastic CMS system, and it was a very close call, but it doesn’t lend itself to multiple sections like Textpattern. Sure, I can install WP several times (and installation is a quick process) but there are seven ‘blogs’ that make up this site, and thats seven to upgrade everytime there’s an update. Textpattern is naturally geared towards managing an entire site with one installation, and that really appealed to me. It lets me do everything very fast, and its admin interface is well designed and pleasing to use.
There was also a indescribable something about Textpattern. It just clicked with me and I enjoyed using it, even if I didn’t fully understand how to do what I wanted to do at first. Going back to Movable Type afterwards felt unfulfilling – so migration was going to happen. Textpattern is by no means as feature-packed as Wordpress, but the few minor features/abilities that I needed are either served by plug-ins or are coming in future versions. There are few niggles too, no system (other than maybe a home-made solution) is perfect, but these weren’t enough to me off.
The migration couldn’t have been done without the ever patient and helpful folks of the Textpattern forum, who put up with my endless poking and interrogation. Responses to my queries were either “find it here..” or “Textpattern doesn’t do that, I’ll write a plugin for it though…”. Like the elves and the shoemaker, I’d wake to find another plug-in had been made. Getting to grips with Textpattern’s tag system was made easy thanks to Kusors Tag Manual . This was another score against WP actually – it uses an XML style tag system which I found more intuitive.
Some notes about the migration:
- The whole site is now powered by Textpattern. When I used MT, only certain sections were driven by the CMS, now its all of it. All apart from…
- The playlist. Its lost its XML feed, and Instead of showing the last 6 albums purchased, it now displays the last 6 played, via the wonder of Michael Simmons’ excellent iTunesWatcher. I’d used version 1 previously, and it just gets better. A very special thankyou to Michael for creating the custom module for displaying the my last 6 covers.
- The articles section is gone. These are now incorporated into the journal for simplicity.
- You can now see what I’m eating, at any time of the day. You lucky people.
- I was planning a redesign of the journal section to coincide with the new CMS, but this was too much in one go. More on that later…
So here we are. There are still a few loose ends to tie up, but everything is pretty much here, with a whopping great .htaccess file to help people find their way here. Please bear with me while I iron out the creases…
Tags: textpattern
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compuwhiz7 said 1537 days ago:
Congratulations on the switch! Glad it went well.I’ll add Textpattern to my list of systems to try out…
Alex said 1537 days ago:
Very smooth transition, I could not even tell you were running TXP.kartooner said 1537 days ago:
Looks great Jon! I’m quite impressed, actually, that the entire site is powered by Textpattern.I use Wordpress for kartooner.com, and at one point considered Textpattern, but all said and done they are both excellent CMS solutions.
I’m contemplating whether or not I want my daughter’s web site (she’s 6 months) powered by Textpattern. My thoughts are that I’d much rather learn a handful of CMS’s, instead of settling on just one to power all of my projects.
This way I’m “fluent” in all CMS “languages”. ;)
Virginia said 1536 days ago:
What are the most noticeable differences between TXP and MT (apart from the price..)? I’m planning to try it out at some point, but I’d love to know what you think TXP does better.Jeff Clark said 1536 days ago:
Way to go Jon! I’m glad to see you finally switched. I’ve been using TXP for about a month and love it all!jperry said 1536 days ago:
stupid question. maybe. how do you get “currently eating” to change w/o republishing the entire site? much thanks.Jeff said 1536 days ago:
I experimented with Textpattern as well for quite some time, and I still have it on my server. I’ll have to dust it off and play with it some more since ultimately I would like to release myself from MT dependence. Good job on the transition.Adam Bramwell said 1536 days ago:
Great, hopefully now we’ll see more regular pings to blo.gs and the like.. your last one was May 21..Matthew Kelley said 1536 days ago:
Nice to see a very popular blog switch to TextPattern… hopefully this will get some well-earned press and more will swtich!By the way, your design is quite killer, I love the leafy-theme goin’ on here.
To all who are playing with TextPattern, make sure you’re up-to-date with the most current issue of it; lots of progress has been made since some of the early betas.
d said 1536 days ago:
tell you what’s really annoying, though – your posts show the number of comments posted to them in the site’s feed.meaning every time someone comments, it “updates”. :)
Brian said 1536 days ago:
Great to see that you are using Textpattern. I really like your site.Just in case you don’t know how to change the feed updating with comments, there is a setting in the admin_conf.php file in the textpattern/lib/ folder or something like that.
Reinier said 1536 days ago:
Great, you made it!Aias said 1536 days ago:
hey jon i dont know if u are aware of this, but your index page displays this message at the top of the screen:—Could not access the database, please make sure that the appropriate values have been added to the configuration file included in this package. !>
it only displays it on Camino (using the new tabs nightly of june 14), clearing the disk cache, erasing history and reloading the site does not make it go away. It displays fine in safari, and idiot explorer (except for the lack of vertical centering). Firefox also shows the same thing as Camino.
On a completely different tip, the latest build of Shiira has enabled printing!
good luck with your new cms, i am still fine tuning my recent install of WordPress :P
Martin said 1536 days ago:
Just in case you don’t know about it:I got this error message at the bottom of the page:
—Could not access the database, please make sure that the appropriate values have been added to the configuration file included in this package. !>
Jon Hicks said 1536 days ago:
Virginia – I’ll be writing some more on my textpattern conversion soon, but I think the main differences are no rebuild times, and the ability to manage a whole site from 1 installation – no need for multiple blogs for different sections.jperry – its just a random text plugin from All in the Head
Daniel – I quite liked the comment count in the xml feed, but if people find it annoying, I’ll just turn it off.
Don’t worry about the error message. At first TXP had a problem with Shaun Inmans shortstats script, but its fixed now.
Didier Hilhorst said 1536 days ago:
I will have to agree with Daniel on the comment count in the xml feed. It is indeed a nice feature, especially to monitor ongoing discussions, but the problem is that the post will update each time and download again. Which, in a worst case scenario, means I have 16 posts entitled “textpattern migration.” Needless to mention that it starts to be seriously annoying after a while.Shaun Inman tried something similar not long ago. He eventually solved the problem by displaying an image, in the xml feed, that incorporates the comment count. In this case the image updates, rather than the aggregator downloading an entire new updated post. Both methods will not win an elegance prize, but using an image solves most of the annoyances that come with it.
Jon Hicks said 1536 days ago:
Consider it off ;o)shmuel said 1536 days ago:
I’d like to weigh in as one of the ones who likes the comment count feature. If your software leaves you with “16 posts entitled ‘textpattern migration.” Your RSS reader should simply update the one title that has changed with a new number. This is how all three of the readers I use behave. To me downloading around 1k (or less) every hour (like any responsible feed reader) doesn’t seem like a big deal.Chris J. Davis said 1536 days ago:
One quick note, WordPress is not, and has never claimed to be a CMS. To classify it as such and then compare it to a system that is formulated to be a CMS is a little misleading.We over in the WP community have to deal with this a lot, which is my reason for commenting.
Love your site by the way, congrats on moving to a really nice CMS.
Jon Hicks said 1536 days ago:
My apologies Chris. Hey – didn’t you used to hang around the Camino forum at Eternal Tedium Mac Browsers board? The name is familiar…kusor said 1536 days ago:
I’m very pleased you’ve found the manual useful.You’ve done a nice job here. A great advertising for Textpattern, without doubt.
max said 1536 days ago:
Looks good on ya! Congrats on the switch. Can’t wait to see your redesign!Eric said 1536 days ago:
Wow, another big name in our Textpattern community… And what a beautiful one!Andrew said 1536 days ago:
Jon,Nice to see another member of the TXP community. when are you switching your hosting to text drive.
Jon Hicks said 1536 days ago:
Andrew – I won’t be moving Hicksdesign to TextDrive. Although I bought a TextDrive account (and I’ll be using it for plenty of other Textpattern sites), Hicksdesign will stay with SegPub. The level of attention, support and service I get from the SegPub chaps is worth holding on to!Caged said 1536 days ago:
Looks real smooth man, congrats on the update.Garrett Murray said 1535 days ago:
I can’t verify that this is still a problem (at work on a PC), but yesterday in Safari this textarea was really small.Also, I would like to be able to post right away rather than have to preview first. (Speaking of preview, why did you ditch the live version?)
Other than that, looking good, Jon.
Brad Brooks said 1535 days ago:
Nice work as ever, Jon.mmm, hot buttered crumpet…
dj blurb said 1535 days ago:
How did you get your archive listing? Any magic involved? Plugins? I’m referring to this page:http://hicksdesign.co.uk/archive/
It’s one of my TXP beefs; minimalist date support.
Jon Hicks said 1535 days ago:
Hey DJ,I’m a big fan of your blog! Particularly being a father of young ‘uns too!
There was no trick, I just got txp to output a list of every single article. I made a special ‘form’ for this so that it just displays titles and not the body or excerpt.
There are some plug-ins for arranging articles into months, but I haven’t got around to trying them out yet. Have a look at the support forum…
tom said 1534 days ago:
Textpattern is indeed quite amazing. In my experience, it’s better suited for slightly-abstract uses (such as what you have here) than any other blog script – it comes the closest to being a CMS. Wordpress will probably reign as the most popular blog script simply because it has focused on that area and does it well.Textpattern is just so… straightforward and right, it’s hard to imagine using anything else.
Don said 1533 days ago:
Is it just me or the search box have come off its intended place? And also the buttons on the index page seem to have changed places since the conversion and they are now overlapping with the search box. The navigation bar and collapsing menu is also a bit different than the old version. I am using IE 6 if that is of any relevance. I don’t know if these were intentional changes but I guess the search box on the navigation bar and small buttons(css, xhtml, txp) on the index page need a second look. I am not writing to criticize at all, I really like this site and was eagerly waiting for its conversion to TXP. Of all, I can easily say that it has mostly been a smooth transition to a very promising piece of software and I think all of us here will see the benefits in the longer term.About TXP, I have to advise everyone to experiment with it at least once or twice to get an idea of what this software truly offers. Personally, I cant even consider myself an intermediate TXP user, but I can say with some confidence that it is very intuitive and actually fun to learn&use. It offers pretty much everything you could ask for running a weblog, or managing a site of certain size and does all these under a killer interface. It stands somewhere right between the blogging tools and complicated CMS tools and fills a huge gap. I think it deserves a look by every web developer out there whatever their goal might be. I am not going to compare it to any other software because I am by no means an expert in this field but I can assure you that you will definitely appreciate TXP if what you like is to have a site similar to Jon Hicks’..
PS. Well not really, that requires an eye for design more than anything else but do not despair we’ll all get there someday :) (please do not take this personally, it was a matter of self-motivation :)
Kjell Olsen said 1532 days ago:
Jon – could you tell how you got the articles in the /archives/ part of your site to use a different form then the /journal/ page?Do you use a different page for each, or a article_custom tag that changes the form?
I’m having a little trouble with my txp site because I want the main page to have the full text of the last few articles, but I want each section page /[section name] to use a form similar to your /archives page, just a list of all the recent entries. Can it be done? Either way, thanks for the inspiration.
AkaXakA said 1531 days ago:
Wow, I’ve used txp back when it was in beta, 1.14 I believe, but it looks like it’s come a long way…I am rather looking forward to your write up on your experiences with txp and what problems you had changing over. Please include your opinion of the other cms’s you tried and what’s even more important, your reasons for not using them.
I see you’ve lost the live preview form…with a reason, or is it just implemented yet? I played around with it too after seeing it on your site and I’ve been tweaking it. You can see the tweaked version on my website where I use it in my contact form.
Jon Hicks said 1530 days ago:
I’ve been having problems getting the live preview thing to work with Textpattern. My original reason for using it was to get around MT’s cgi-only preview pages. I’ll hopefully work it out soon..Eris said 1530 days ago:
Nothing truly constructive here exept to say “good job!” on making the choice to move to TxP instead of something else … not that I’m biased or anything. ;)Ethan said 1529 days ago:
Congrats on the migration, Jon — truth be told, the need for a whopping great .htaccess file was the one thing that kept me from choosing TextPattern over WordPress. I was sold on TXP’s elegance when I first tried it out; I probably should give it another shot.