David Emery Online

On Textpattern

15 May 2007

Drew McLellan has just posted a rather interesting article on the current state of Textpattern – well worth a read.

As regular readers may know, I’m a heavy user of Textpattern – this blog runs on it, and so do 18 other sites under my control so I’d like to think I’m in a position to talk about Textpattern with some authority.

I both agree and disagree with Drew’s post*; the state and future of Textpattern development is certainly on rocky ground, but it doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t be using it. It would be really, really great to both get more regular updates to Textpattern, and to have some form of roadmap for the future.

As Drew says, while you can add enormous amounts of functionality to Textpattern by using its plugin facility, or by submitting patches, it’s a system that brakes down completely either when Textpattern gets updated, or if you need to use another plugin which assumes it’s running on a stock install. As a case in point, our internal intranet is running on a very customised version of Textpattern 4.0.3, running a host of plugins – some written by us – to add things like posting by email and tagging, and there’s currently no practical way of upgrading to the latest version (4.0.4) without putting a lot of work in.

All that said, I still think Textpattern is the best current choice for a blogging platform and lightweight CMS. I’ve – like most Textpattern users, I guess – have been recently looking for alternative options, and I’ve turned up nothing that beats the current version of Textpattern. I’ve tried Wordpress on a couple of sites, and I’ve been utterly unimpressed – it’s just not as flexible as Textpattern, and I’m not a fan of the admin interface (although to be honest the Textpattern one isn’t that great – a makeover/skin for it is permanently on my to-do-if-i-get-some-free-time list).

Expression Engine looks great, but costs too much (for the amount of sites I turn around) and I’d really like something open source. Drupal, Mambo et al are just all far too complicated for their own good.

Quite simply, this is a problem that hasn’t been solved well yet. Despite its development troubles, in my opinion Textpattern is still the best option out there today.