The Hickensian

14.08.05

Now powered by Textpattern 4

They finally did it! Textpattern has just gone final, stable, and starts at version 4! Within in a minute, Hicksdesign was updated and running my favourite CMS. Another minute later, so was PimpMySafari.

I’ve tried, and keep on trying, other CMS’s and blogware, but keep coming back to Textpattern. Its well designed, lightweight in feel (but well endowed in features), fast to use, and most of all, logical. I still can’t imagine using anything else.

Dean, Zem, Kusor, Sencer and all the team – this is for you…

The celebratory Stinking Bishop Cheese

Comments | RSS

No.1

mat said 1419 days ago:

I still can’t believe that it’s free.

No.2

Zach said 1419 days ago:

You’ve tried Wordpress. What is it that makes you prefer Textpattern?

No.3

proph3t said 1419 days ago:

I’ve found textpattern to be quite a bit more flexible and discreet than wordpress. It’s very simple and easy to set up, but with categories, sections, forms, styles and pages all configurable from within it, you can set up infinitely complex websites. Plugin support is awesome as well, so if it lacks anything you need you can 99% of the time find the correct plugin, and if not, make your own.

Don’t forget to thank Sencer! He’s been working on it quite a lot lately.

No.4

Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain said 1419 days ago:

I have yet to use textpattern, but I’ll check it out later on today. Just curious… have you tried Expression Engine? I can’t imagine a blogging app/CMS being more flexible than EE.

No.5

proph3t said 1419 days ago:

I have not yet tried Expression Engine, but from what I’ve heard it is amazing. Someday hopefully, but unfortunately it is not free.

Textpattern does have enough flexibility to create websites such as this though: WinAtPoker

As you can see, it barely resembles a blog at all, yet it functions entirely on textpattern. Basically, its flexible enough ;-)

No.6

Alex said 1419 days ago:

Flexibility isn’t everything, Jesse. A few quick reasons: Textpattern is free software ; it’s very fast (our benchmarks show txp-4.0 beating Lightpress out of the box); everything is XHTML+CSS, and well suited to web standards designers; and the template tag system is up there with the best of them, and fully customizable via plugins.

No.7

Miko said 1419 days ago:

Wow, the site feels faster ;)

No.8

Matt Robin said 1419 days ago:

Brilliant! :)

So jon, do you rate this higher than Wordpress too? And if yes – why?
(I also know that the man Oxton is a fan of it – to some degree – which is an opinion I value highly too)

No.9

Byron McCollum said 1419 days ago:

Your RSS feed is b0rkd. The last 3 posts show the contents of this post.

No.10

James Muspratt said 1419 days ago:

Woohoo!

For all those wondering what advantages Textpattern has over Wordpress, you might want to take a look at some of the free downloads at Textgarden. Whether you like the designs or not, they’ll give you a sense of how clear and legible Textpattern templates can be, thanks to the use of XML-style tags and the separation of pages and forms.

And if you care about web typography, having Textile integrated is the icing on the cake.

No.11

Azad said 1419 days ago:

(Jons note: I really should've deleted this comment, but its too late now.)
You should try out Nucleus. Its the most powerful blogging platform ever. It has the easiest templating syntax, which makes designing easier (unlike Wordpress where things are pretty messed up).

It also has a huge plugin repository and it has a user community of over 50,000 folks (TXP doesnt ever have 1000).

I highly recommend Nucleus CMS over Textpattern or Wordpress

No.12

Natalie said 1419 days ago:

I’m so glad the move was simple!

I’m moving all my stuff over in the not-too-distant future, just have to sqeeze all the MT tags out of my brain to fit the Textpattern ones in ;p

No.13

Jon Hicks said 1419 days ago:

Hey Azad – you’re gatecrashing the celebrations here! So what if Nucleus has more members in its community?

No.14

david said 1419 days ago:

Azad, if I wanted to read spam ads in comments, I’d visit my own blog.

Congrats on TXP4!

Any specific new features you used? Or did you upgrade because it’s the thing to do when TXP goes final?

No.15

Richard Medek said 1419 days ago:

I think WP might be a little more powerful as a blog, per se, but for a website that leans a little out of the “blog” category TXP is the way to go. It’s much more flexible, waaay easier to set up different templates for each section, and the forums are actually nice. Have you ever been to a WP forum? Everytime I search the WP forum for an answer to a question I only find posts that say “search the forum.” Auuugh!

The most amazing thing about TXP-~~not to mention the other fantastic open source products out there~~-is that it’s free. Any advice about Text Drive?

No.16

Richard Medek said 1419 days ago:

ah, Textile turned my em dashes into a strikethrough. It looks like I’m trying to diss the rest of the open source community now. :)

No.17

Alex said 1419 days ago:

I’m not sure where the “not even 1000” users figure comes from. The txp forum has over 6,000.

No.18

Lowell Wood said 1419 days ago:

I highly recomend textpattern to anyone in the world. it is the first cms i have ever used, and have not found a single thing it cannot do. That being said, i would like to thank the duders on textpattern forums for helping me whenever i have had problems.

No.19

matt Carey said 1419 days ago:

I must give textpattern a go after all these glowing reports! been a MT person for a while, but it frustrates the hell out of me!

No.20

Mearso said 1419 days ago:

We have used textpattern at www.glam.ac.uk for our new look site. We find that it’s pretty good for providing a solid base for a team of content writers and editors to manage. And one shouldn’t underestimate the ease of having most of what you need in one place.

Conditional tags are a boon, as is the integration of textile.

We have over a 1000 articles in there now and more to come as we move the rest of the site over.

The hardest part for me personally is deciding when something is possible just by some clever thinking and when a plug-in is needed.

One of the team is adept at writing plug-ins and we use quite a few of our own.

One feature I would like is more configuration of error messages – currently difficult to do.

No.21

brian said 1419 days ago:

Jon,
How did you, within minutes, fix up all your comment tweaks to the new install? Including the live preview? Now that you’re moved over, I’d love to see a revised “Tweaking Textpattern” post.

No.22

Jon Hicks said 1419 days ago:

Brian – the comment tweaks exist in a separate plugin now -hacked into ‘low_discuss’, but now that the final version is out, I’m going to redo it all and provide the files to do it yourself.

No.23

Dean Allen said 1419 days ago:

Damn you Hicks, calling my baby cheesy! ;-)

Thanks everyone for the kind thoughts, and I must check out this nucleus thing…

No.24

Reid said 1419 days ago:

Textpattern: The “well endowed” CMS. Now with cheese!

After four years wrangling with Blogger, then Greymatter, then MT, the past 1.3 years with Textpattern have been like a tropical honeymoon.

And that was with a gamma release. Now we’ve got Textpattern MX 2005 CS!

No.25

Mike Stenhouse said 1419 days ago:

I’ve only used TxP on one site and Wordpress on one other but I’ve struggled with both. TxP makes, in my opinion, far more sense than Wordpress but both seem TOO feature heavy. That might just be how my head works… I think it’s a side-effect of community development that features get added to solve every conceivable problem at the expense of robustness and simplicity. I’d definitely use TxP again but I still think there’s work to be done… It’s good to see they’ve finally gone full-version though – that should inspire more confidence.

When I’ve got time I will be getting my teeth into Symphony. Their templating system just makes sense to me, as does the categories system. Have to wait and see how that goes…

No.26

Lowell Wood said 1419 days ago:

Jon; thanks for making all our png gravs look groovy. looks like the txp upgrade has rejuvinated your creative juices for this place.

No.27

Jacques Marneweck said 1419 days ago:

Definately going to take another look at textpattern.

No.28

pketh said 1418 days ago:

I upgraded too, it does feel fast – but then it always has for me. I was surprised and impressed to find not a single hitch to the process

The main perk for me is the new image thumbnail making (something I missed from MT back in the day)

No.29

Nathan Smith said 1418 days ago:

I agree, I’ve messed around with MovableType and WordPress, but I keep sticking with Textpattern. I’m going to be switching hosts soon, just to take more advantage of what Textpattern has to offer (1and1 hates native clean URLs). My 2nd CMS of choice is still WordPress, but I just love the flexibility and logical XML style Textpattern tags.

No.30

brian said 1418 days ago:

Awesome. Didn’t know about low_discuss, I’ll be checking that out. And as for you providing the files to make it happen, that’s just splendid. Thanks Jon.

No.31

john Oxton said 1418 days ago:

I’ve been unplugged but I would just like to say: WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

No.32

Jon Hicks said 1418 days ago:

For those that have asked for a comparison with Wordpress, I’ll just write a few notes:

Wordpress is a feature-rich CMS for creating a blog easily out of a box. Its a superb piece of work, and with 1.5, you can manage static pages too. Textpattern has less ‘blog’ features, but feels uncluttered, lightweight and nimble. It lets you manage content for an entire site easily, and has (I think) a better tag system (based on XML, rather than php). Unlike WP, TXP doesn’t have a nice design out of the box.

At the end of the day its a close call – and I think it comes down to ‘feel’ and personal choice. My feel is for TXP!

No.33

Andrea Parrish said 1418 days ago:

Why don’t we just get serious about this. Boxing match!
Dean Allen vs. Matt Mullenweg

In all seriousness, I agree with Jon. With all of the great choices out there it really is just a personal preference—not something to form a competition of.

But rock out with your 4.0ness!

No.34

Mark Steinruck said 1418 days ago:

John,
Did you have any problem with PhotoStack with the new installation? I get a message saying

If you just updated and expect to see your site here, please also update the files in your main installation directory. (Otherwise note that publish.php cannot be called directly.)

I originally followed your instructions to integrate it into TXP, but now I can’t figure out why it won’t work.

No.35

Azad said 1418 days ago:

Its great If you’re happy with TXP 4.0. I tried it myself and it didnt suit me, that’s why i said all those stuff.

Anyway, my last comment wasnt an advert. Im just a big nucleus fan.

It helps when the user community is big. You can get help and support faster.

Cheers!

No.36

Jon Hicks said 1418 days ago:

Yup – and Textpattern certainly has a large and helpful community – thats one of the attractions for me. I’m sure Nucleus is great, but your comment was ill-placed on a post celebrating the release of Textpattern. More suitable on a “what CMS should I use?” type post.

Also – having a brief look at the Nucleus demo, it doesn’t look as if it handles sections!

Mark – I stopped using Photostack now that Flickr is in town – sorry!

No.37

Bastiaan Terhorst said 1418 days ago:

I’ve been a textpattern user for quite some time now, and while I absolutely love it, there is one thing that bugs me. Why is everything stored in the database? CSS, templates, plugins… This makes it quite annoying to work on the code (try writing a php plugin in a textbox, or some complicated nested html). I wish there was an option to use files instead, it would make things so much easier.

No.38

Jon Hicks said 1418 days ago:

I use external CSS, but editable templates like Wordpress would be great.

No.39

Dean Allen said 1418 days ago:

Bastiaan,

The idea behind keeping everything in the database is mainly portability. Mysqldump your db, install it somewhere else with a clean codebase, and you’ll likely end up with the same site.

As to the, um, pleasures of editing code in a textarea: I rarely do it myself, preferring to cut and paste between bbedit/textmate and the txp admin. If however you’re interested in only saving live code directly from a texteditor, minor tweaking to, say fetch_form() in /lib/txplib_misc.php, telling it to grab from the fs rather than the db, would be the way to go.

The possibility of switching becoming a config option is slim, though who knows.

No.40

Bastiaan Terhorst said 1417 days ago:

Dean, I understand the advantages of having an all-db setup, but the simple fact is that in a real-life situation a db dump will never do. There will always things like images and flash movies to upload by hand. Why not templates too?

Anyway, for free software, I’m not complaining.
Thanks for all the effort :)

No.41

Phong said 1417 days ago:

I am glad I moved to TXP. I like how it feels lightweight yet is heavy on features. Still playing around with it. It is great once you learn how TXP works.

No.42

John Y. said 1417 days ago:

I just want to add my voice to those looking forward to your redone tweaking/comments post.

Keep up the great work, Jon!

No.43

Brandon Erik Bertelsen said 1413 days ago:

Ditto here, the update is hot. I just noticed that the preview shows as I’m typing. That’s sexy. I’m watching myself type. OK, So where’s the article about how you managed that one. Sexy.

No.44

Josh said 1409 days ago:

Say, do you still have Shortstats running? I’m having trouble getting it to run on a TxP 4.0 site. Any hints are appreciated! (Couldn’t figure out the section text files in the root thing.)

No.45

tyee said 1403 days ago:

Has anyone created a screen capture tutorial for textpattern? I’ve gone through a few tuts including textbook and textpattern resources. The best was a link to “http://moae.org/txp” in my opinion. Using a new template from oswd.com was great, but a video tut would be awesome.

No.46

Chris said 1401 days ago:

Somehow stumbled on this site, (no idea how I got here) and having never heard of textpattern decided to check it out. It’s fantastic! 3 sites later I’m one hell of a happy user. How did I not hear about this earlier?

No.47

brandon said 1401 days ago:

I agree textpattern is the only app I will be using, I’ve tried most as well. Simple upgrading, fast code, customization is straight forward… now i just gotta figure out how you did the live search…

tutorials for this cool javascriptedness would rock john for integrating into textpattern. I can’t seem to figure out how to add a simple onFocus() to the search box.