29/08/04
31Textpattern 2 months on
Two months after migrating to Textpattern, I thought I’d go over some of my thoughts since then. In particular, I’ve heard some people mention that they might migrate too, because it was ‘good enough for me’. So that no one blames for me for a move that they then regret, I’ll be honest about my Textpattern experience.
First of all, the things I’ve loved about using TXP so far:
- Setting up new sections, links, RSS feeds and editing templates and entries are quick and easy.
- I still love the XML style tags that it uses. I find these intuitive and pleasant to use (with a couple of exceptions – see below).
- The Textpattern community are great at coming forward with useful plug-ins. They make it worthwhile.
- The admin interface is just great. Simple and clean and delightful to use.
- For some reason, I’ve posted far more regularly with TXP than I ever did with MT. I used to spend ages writing and re-writing posts, some would take months before I made them live. Whether this means more posts but with less quality, is for you to judge!
Its not all sunshine and tweety birds though, and there are few things that niggle me.
- My main beef is that some (though not all) of the tags output the XHTML for you. E.g with MT, the permalink tag outputted only the link path, but Textpattern does the whole tag. So if you want control over it, you have to hack the textpattern php files. In particular, there were various unnesessary classes and small pieces of inline css that TXP generated. I’ve hacked a lot of these out, so I dread the next upgrade! As I understand it, Wordpress suffers from similar problems, and only MovableType really offers that flexibility.
- It doesn’t have XML-RPC support (yet) so you can’t use something like Ecto to post entries. Especially as the next version of Ecto will include Textile previewing, my desire for this has grown. The admin interface is well designed, but drafts can get easily lost in the list of articles. With a weblog editor, Drafts are separated from the list of live articles, and previews are created live to save switching between ‘text’ and ‘preview’. Generally, a desktop client will always have the edge. In fact, I’ve missed this feature so much, that I’ve considered using Wordpress or reverting to MT for just the blog section. As I said previously, my reason for not going with Wordpress, was that it didn’t handle mutliple sections. Its excellent at what it does though – running a blog. The problems with php5 and Wordpress have prevented me testing this as a solution though. MT 3.1 also looks promising, with its support for dynamic pages solving my main MT bugbear – long rebuilds when fiddling with templates.
- Navigating links in the admin interface can be painful if you have a lot. I use ‘links’ for my sidenotes, browser news and destinations links, and you don’t get the easy search facility that you get with articles.
- I’d also like to see a way of getting clean url’s on categories built in.
Please don’t take this as a ‘woe is Textpattern’ statement, its far from it. – more of a report of my experience so far. Whether features like XML-RPC support will be added in the future or not is hard to say. Dean is a busy man who needs to earn a living (which doesn’t come from TXP!), and communications from him on where Textpattern is going is scant.
Update 20.9.04: Metaweblog support is going to be added in the near future, and a clearer vision of Textpattern’s future is emerging. I had a brief dalliance with Wordpress again – and confirmed my belief that it so isn’t the right tool for me. MT 3.1 looked improved, but Textpattern is most definitely where its still at for me.
Tags: reviews, textpattern
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Rachel C said 1471 days ago:
Thanks for the insight into Textpattern. I recently made the switch from MT to WordPress and have enjoyed it immensely. Still have lots to learn.The WordPress PHP5 problem is really a PHP5 problem which is fixed with the nighly build (see here).
Will continue to keep my eye on Textpattern to see where development of both systems leads.
John Serris said 1471 days ago:
I’m not sure what TXP is like these days, but I tried it out while it was still an early beta. I did the same thing you did. Hack the hell out of it to get the output I wanted. Upgrading was a real pain, so I eventually created my own cms which did the job for a while. Yesterday, I moved my site over to Wordpress. It’s pretty good but I wish you could create multiple sections/pages. Ah well, I hear thats coming soon.Matt said 1471 days ago:
Writing your own CMS is the best thing to do. It’s the way forward.jasidog said 1471 days ago:
Well, I never converted to Textpattern (Most of my site was static pages before. ) but I did decide to have another look at it after you converted.I’d been looking for something for a while, wanted something open source and needed more than just blog capabilities.
My site isn’t a blog at all, so it was seeing how you were able to use it to power a site with different sections and layouts that convinced me to persevere with it.
So far I’m happy, most of the issues you have I don’t . One because it’s not a blog and two because things like comments are off. So I think all the inline stuff Textpattern throws out is not being used in my case.
I’ve had a few issues here and there but in all cases so far a plugin has filled any needs.
The one thing I’d really like at presant is better and more conditionals.
Course my site isn’t really an advertisement for it though, skills are something I need to acquire. :D
Jon Hicks said 1471 days ago:
Rachel – I used yesterdays nighty build, and the log-in problem is still there. Have you been able to get it working?Lets hear no more talk about creating my own CMS. I have neither the spare time nor the skills to make my own. I’m very happy using Textpattern.
Ryan Brill said 1471 days ago:
Writing your own CMS is the best thing to do.Not for everybody. Writing your own CMS takes a lot of time, especially if you try to write one the quality of Textpattern or WordPress. If you’ve got the time and enjoy writing such applications, it is nice to have total control over how the system works, but there is a lot of work to take into consideration before you decide to go that route.
Rob Mientjes said 1471 days ago:
Writing your own CMS is tough. Luckily, I have a code puppet, who does this all for me. And he offered it himself, so I don’t feel guilty :opTextpattern has intrigued me, since I see the flexibility I sometimes miss in WordPress, but it seems 1.3 is getting much better.
Kyle Rove said 1471 days ago:
Did you try the latest nightly build of PHP 5 or WP?WordPress and PHP5 states that the latest PHP 5 nightly is where the fix can be found, not the latest WP. Maybe you confused the two?
Matthew Kelley said 1471 days ago:
Important to remember that textpattern is still heavily under development, it’s not even out of gamma yet. There are so many CMS out now that are free and easily setup it’s really down to one thing: user choice and preference.I use textpattern because of two main reasons:
# The textpattern forums and users are the most helpful bunch I’ve encountered.
# I beleive in Dean’s abilities, and I’ve read about what is to come in textpattern, and it excites me a great deal.
Most CMS try to accomplish the same thing—there are just different ways of going about it—what it comes down to is one’s preference. Really, what does it for me is knowing that it’s just going to get better and better; textpattern may be a little buggy or bloated in a few areas but Dean knows this. Things may be a little rigid and hard to customize, but as textpattern grows, he has assured us that things will be easier to customize.
I’ve used wordpress a little bit, and I wasn’t as impressed with it as I was with textpattern. Maybe that’s because I was using textpattern before I found wordpress, but in any case, both have advantages and disadvantages.
The beauty of all of this is the freedom of choice, textpattern, wordpress, movable type; whatever you pick… they’re all more than capable of blogging.
Matthew Kelley said 1471 days ago:
Jon—Textile is enabled in the preview, but once you submit your comment it doesn’t seem to convert ordered lists in textile to HTML. Just noticed this in my comment.Tomas Jogin said 1471 days ago:
When you made the switch, I actually seriously considered switching to TxP as well. I installed it, tried it out, but not before long found out that TxP is utterly incapable of properly santized URLs, at which point I shook my head, uninstalled it, and never thought of it again.I tried WP as well, but in my very humble opinion it feels like one gigantic hack, unlike TxP which seems very polished.
For now, I’m sticking with MT.
tarun said 1471 days ago:
I have to agree with the major criticism of the tags outputting code snippets versus just the minimum. Especially with the forms feature, there is really no reason for it.Matthew Kelley said 1471 days ago:
Tomas: Clean URLs are be a bit of a problem (I, personally, have not had an issue with them), but most of the time I don’t think it’s textpattern’s fault. The servers you install textpattern on have a great deal of influence on getting clean URLs to work.Matt said 1471 days ago:
When I said writing your own CMS was the thing to do, I was being slightly pedantic. I mean, of course, for some people it’s the worst thing to do. But it’s certainly something that if you manage to do, reaps great rewards. I mean, it also gives a great indication to how system management works and how content is managed by computers themselves. I was very tempted to jump onto the Textpattern, dare I say, ‘bandwagon’, but I thought I would stick at it until I had my own, fairly stable and secure CMS.I remember the days of using Blogger. God bless the lil’ star…
Clive Walker said 1471 days ago:
Only been using Textpattern for a short while – mainly as an experiment because it was different to what I have done before. Quite like it but would prefer more direct control over the output on occasion. Agree that the support forum has been v helpful.Jeff Clark said 1471 days ago:
I, too, have had to hack the code to pull out the auto-generated XHTML. Upgrades are going to be HELL!As for this Ecto thing, does anyone use that right now? And can you explain what it is? The site makes it look like it’s a Windows app … and as cool as that would be just doesn’t make sense to me. (but then again I just got up…)
Tomas Jogin said 1471 days ago:
Matthew Kelley: TxP’s weakness in the “clean urls” department is very much TxP’s fault, not the servers’. WP and MT, which manage clean urls quite well, can be, and often is, installed on the exact same server environments as TxP is. Also, remember that WP and TxP is built using the same server environment.Jon Hicks said 1471 days ago:
Jeff, I think you’re looking at the screenshots of the Windows version. Ecto was originally an OS X app (used to be called ‘Kung-Log’) and a windows version followed later on.It’s basically a desktop application for posting entries, like NetNewsWire’s inbuilt weblog editor (which I used to use until I switched to TXP). Think of it like reading and sending email on your computer, rather than using a webmail interface. Kyle- I was confusing the 2, thanks for explaining. Unfortunately, I can't imagine that I can get php updated to a nighty build when I'm on a shared server - could potentially cause more problems for other users.
Matthew Kelley said 1471 days ago:
Tomas: I’ve heard both sides of the arguement. Search the textpattern forums for this and you’ll find a slew of blame placed on both the servers and textpattern… I’m not claiming to be an expert, pretty much far from it, but I got them to work within a minute of switching options. I’d like to find out why some people have issues and some don’t; and it seems to me there are only a few versions of textpattern floating around, and thousands of different servers configured thousands of different ways. So naturally, I pointed the blame at the servers, as some others have done on the forums… but hell, I’d like to get to the bottom of this issue just to know. It seems to be confusing a lot of people (and turning them away).Sidenote: Part of the reason why I got my clean URLs working so easy is probably due to the fact that I use Textdrive webhosting which is configured to run textpattern optimally, clean URLs and everything.
If I remember correctly, it has a lot to do with mod_rewrite (or the possibilities of using mod_rewrite), as Dean explores the possibilities of mod_rewrite on the forums.
The overall impression (although obviously it’s a bit biased) is that it’s more a server issue than textpattern issue, but both are clearly to blame for some role in getting clean URLs to function properly.
Reid said 1471 days ago:
I switched to TXP on 04/04/04, and I agree with most of your comments. I hope v1.0 will remedy some of the internally generated style issues, and maybe ease the admin interface as well (since I’ve got 2,000+ articles, I agree, it’s not very efficient).And while I’d love to see XML-RPC as well, I’m using the same external editor I did with Blogger and MT … Notepad (or rather, a steroidal deriviative )
I think sometimes TXP gets knocked a bit because it’s not exactly a plug-n-play app for the masses … yet (nor has it advertised itself as such). For example, many of us are waiting for v1.0 to contribute templates/styles to give new users some choice. I expect in a lot of ways, the flood gates will open when 1.0 is released.
Justin French said 1470 days ago:
TXP seems to “help” me a lot more than I need it to… The permalink is a classic example, and the comments and search forms are even more painful to “fix” – I too am dreading an update on my site, and I’ve made no where near as many mods as you!It’s a different beast to MT and WP – I think it’s simplicity will eventually be great for those who don’t care too much about the nuts and bolts (ie, those new to web publishing, and need a near-turn-key solution), and will be a huge pain in the ass to power users who want to have greater control.
The reality is that no software can please everyone. TXP will—overtime—either become what you want, or it won’t, at which time you’ll look for something else.
We’re not paying for the privilege of it’s use, so in the end we have very little to complain about :)
Tomas Jogin said 1470 days ago:
Matthew Kelley: I suppose I should have said “cruft-free URLs” instead of “sanitized URLs”. What I meant was clean URLs which do not have any reference to a numeric ID in them.Your URLs, while relatively nice, contain a reference to the post’s numeric ID. This is one of the things we usually refer to as “cruft”.
When I tried out TxP, it was not capable of using cruft-free URLs, and as far as I can tell it still isn’t. Not out of the box anyways, I assume it can be done with a certain level of intestinal hacking (which usually makes upgrading a nightmare).
Jon Hicks said 1470 days ago:
You’re quite right Tomas, the id number in TXP is unavoidable unless you hack away. Whether this is crufty is a matter of opinion. I don’t mind the conciseness of the ID URL that much.Lee said 1470 days ago:
I’ve been playing with CMSs this weekend and it’s the first chance I’ve had to get my hands dirty with Textpattern.I was impressed with it, especially after playing with a few other CMSs, which were no where near as flexible for layout.
It’s promising enough that I’m going to try and through a real world site together using it. I use WP for my personal site at the moment, but I hacked the crap out of it to get it working anywhere near right, TXP might be an alternative.
Matt said 1469 days ago:
If you could give me access to a PHP5 sandbox perhaps I could debug the problem. Let me know if you’re interested. Very few hosts have switched to PHP 5 already so it really hasn’t been to big of a problem thus far.Matt said 1469 days ago:
// ...the tags output the XHTML for you. //Nucleus, yet another CMS system, splits its outputting system between templates and skins. Using templates (more than one skin can use a template), you can very easily control the code Nucleus outputs.
nucleuscms.org
Euan said 1468 days ago:
Well I looked at changing CMS when MT first announced 3.0, but more because of the license changes/costs.However, they did eventually change them to what is, in my opinion, more realistic and hence I purchased the unlimited personal license.
MT 3.1 was released yesterday, just downloaded it and hopefully manage to take a look at it tonight.
James said 1463 days ago:
Personally, at the moment I prefer WordPress. I’m just waiting for TextPattern to improve just a little.Jim Rutherford said 1463 days ago:
I recently switched to TXP for my blog, and what immediately struck me was the flexibility that it offers. As my primary job I teach in a Digital Media university program. Seeing the flexible nature of TXP, we are using TXP as more of a CMS system and have built our Intranet site using TXP. Even our course syllabi are generated using TXP.My favourite feature of TXP is the ease in which plugins can be created. The framework is simple to work with (keeping in mind that knowledge of PHP is a must).
Sencer said 1462 days ago:
What I personally like is, that it is possible to customize and hack TXP a good deal with the use of Plug-Ins which won’t break when you upgrade (until Dean starts changing his global variables….)So it is possible to re-create the tags to do exactly what you want, without touching the code and worrying about upgrading. This requires a bit more work than just hacking the code (actually I hope the plugin-creation itself will become easier that it currently is) and it doesn’t work for all required changes, IMHO it may be worth it for some people. As always it is a cost-benefit calculation.
Mike Wilson said 1456 days ago:
Hi,I noticed some people commented about the impossibility of using WordPress to maintain multiple sections of a site; however it can be acomplished in current versions of WP with a little hacking. I don’t want to go into all the details here, but Chris Davis’s Faking it: WordPress as CMS overview should help you get started.
M. Wilson