is Textpattern for me

gour · 2013-01-17 08:44:21

Hello!

in short: I’m looking for a stable & mature CMS with large-enough community on which I can settle for longer-term which offers everything for my web needs (smaller-medium sites), having enough extensions/add-ons/plugins enabling me to use them as ‘lego-bricks’ and integrate everything together without the need to go too deep under the hood, so wondering if Textpattern is the right choice for me?

long: In the past I did use CMS Made Simple and did few sites with it, but left due to some issues within community.
Afterwards tried Joomla, but quickly uninstalled it.

When MODx Revo appeared, I did try it and played with it for some time but left seeing it was not clear where it was going.

Then tried tinkering with Django, mostly with Django-CMS, but the project had problems with compatibilities between dependencies for different ‘reusable apps’.

Then used SilverStripe (2.4.x), but it felt too rudimentary and not so many modules/extensions and afterwards discovered’ Concrete5 which is at the moment used for the non-profit organization I’m creating content for.

For my private site i use(d) WP which is simple blog, but we want to expand it into bigger site documenting our upcoming open-source multi-platform desktop project.

Considering that we planned to do our desktop project in Python and in order to not ‘change gears’ too often, I did evaluate web2py which we like as the framework, but there is not the single mature CMS written in it – there are 2 altogether which are mostly one-man-show without any community around it.

That led us back to Django where we find: Django-CMS, Mezzanine and FeinCMS, but all of them are not so big projects in terms of number of devs & community and lack all the ‘bricks’ we’d need to migrate our sites to them which means learning a framework.

Finally, we have to put asap web site for our small company site and invested some $s in buying add-ons for Concrete5, but we really do not like their business model – plenty of add-ons which are mostly non-free.

Moreover, docs for their framework is in a need of some love and the core team is also not too big.

I’ve tried TYPO3 which is powerful, but, maybe, too complex and (probably) overkill for our needs.

Lastly, I play(ed) with Tiki CMS which looks nice, many features out-of-the-box, using wiki syntax for writing content, fully open-source etc.

Then, I somehow ‘discovered’ Textpattern and I like its simplicity…installed 4.5.4 yesterday, but had problems getting blog archive working on my small blog site imported from WP.

Moreover, there seems to be plenty of plugins available, but it’s not easy to find out which are working with the latest released version, some are obsolete, orphans etc.

So, I’ll describe what functionality I’d like to have out-of-the-box (I’m aware that almost everything is possible to write, but I’d prefer having most puzzles on their place, if possible), so, I’d be very thankful if you can help me evaluate Textpattern in terms of my needs which are:

decent blog engine with comments, archives, tag/category clouds, recent posts/comments etc., support for Disqus, which would be use on all the three sites (private, non-profit, company)
extensions for google-maps front-end, Piwik support…
extension to handle public download area counting number of downloads for media files (audio, video)
extension for document management to provide private downloadable
area for our (registered) clients, so that each client can access his/her private support docs/multimedia-files etc. (to be used on company site)
simple shop so that customers can offer our ‘products’ which are actually just homeopathy & counseling services – nothing complicated since there are not thousands products to be handled.
Moreover, in the beginning, we need simple checkout to provide info how customers can pay for their orders via Internet banking etc., but later we’d like to offer accepting of credit cards payment, so having nice infrastructure in some shop/cart to easily write custom payment module for the form-api gateway would be great.
In the future, we may need to add some calendaring plugin so that customers can ‘book’ free time for their appointment when ordering some service.
support for Croatian language so that we do not need to translate front-end from the scratch.
That’s pretty much all what we need at the moment and wonder how Textpattern can
fulfill those requirements?

I do not mind learning a bit of PHP, but I simply do not find myself as Pro PHP developer writing complex plugins.

How does Textpattern support non-Apache servers for pretty URLs?

Any advice is welcome.

Sincerely,
Gour

colak · 2013-01-17 10:22:23

Hi Gour and welcome to txp,

decent blog engine with comments, archives, tag/category clouds, recent posts/comments etc., support for Disqus, which would be use on all the three sites (private, non-profit, company)

All can be done. there are people here who use Disqus and they will probably help.

extensions for google-maps front-end, Piwik support…

Piwik forum post. There are plugis for Google maps too.

extension to handle public download area counting number of downloads for media files (audio, video)

Downloads are counted out of the box but if you have them embedded in the page, then an extension will be needed

extension for document management to provide private downloadable area for our (registered) clients, so that each client can access his/her private support docs/multimedia-files etc. (to be used on company site)

It is You could have registerred users using a number of plugins. Regarding private downloadable area, maybe somebody here would advice.

simple shop so that customers can offer our ‘products’ which are actually just homeopathy & counseling services – nothing complicated since there are not thousands products to be handled.

yap_shop plugin will be of help.

support for Croatian language so that we do not need to translate front-end from the scratch.

the front end can be any language you like. Having said that some automatically generated words (like posted for example) will be in english. It is very easy to create your local language file though.

Moreover, in the beginning, we need simple checkout to provide info how customers can pay for their orders via Internet banking etc., but later we’d like to offer accepting of credit cards payment, so having nice infrastructure in some shop/cart to easily write custom payment module for the form-api gateway would be great.
In the future, we may need to add some calendaring plugin so that customers can ‘book’ free time for their appointment when ordering some service

springworks · 2013-01-17 10:50:37

Hi Gour,

Welcome to Textpattern!

in short: I’m looking for a stable & mature CMS with large-enough community on which I can settle for longer-term which offers everything for my web needs (smaller-medium sites), having enough extensions/add-ons/plugins enabling me to use them as ‘lego-bricks’ and integrate everything together without the need to go too deep under the hood, so wondering if Textpattern is the right choice for me?

In short: Yes. Textpattern is wonderfully adaptable to a wide range of different scenarios. The community here is very friendly and helpful and there are a wide range of useful plug-ins (extensions) that can really add to the power of Textpattern to enable you to make some quite complex sites.

To address a couple of your requirements that I have experience of:

extension for document management to provide private downloadable area for our (registered) clients, so that each client can access his/her private support docs/multimedia-files etc. (to be used on company site)

I’ve set up a private area on a charity website I created using Textpattern and a number of plug-ins. Although this was a single, shared private area for members of the charity only, I don’t see why the idea couldn’t be extended to offer individual private areas, based on login name, groups, etc.

simple shop so that customers can offer our ‘products’ which are actually just homeopathy & counseling services – nothing complicated since there are not thousands products to be handled. Moreover, in the beginning, we need simple checkout to provide info how customers can pay for their orders via Internet banking etc., but later we’d like to offer accepting of credit cards payment, so having nice infrastructure in some shop/cart to easily write custom payment module for the form-api gateway would be great. In the future, we may need to add some calendaring plugin so that customers can ‘book’ free time for their appointment when ordering some service.

PayPal cart integration is certainly possible to handle shopping, again, this is something I have done before. It all depends on what your requirements are regarding products, payment processing, stock control (if any), etc.

Overall I find Textpattern to be a very capable and powerful CMS. It’s way beyond a simple blogging engine, though, of course, it can do that too.

gour · 2013-01-17 11:32:46

colak wrote:

Hi Gour and welcome to txp,

Thank you.

All can be done. there are people here who use Disqus and they will probably help.

What about archives, tag/category clouds? Any concrete plugins?

I was fiddling with some recommended in #textpattern, but no luck.

Piwik forum post. There are plugis for Google maps too.

Thanks. I’ll check out those.

Downloads are counted out of the box but if you have them embedded in the page, then an extension will be needed

OK.

You could have registered users using a number of plugins. Regarding private downloadable area, maybe somebody here would advice.

OK.

“yap_shop”

Good.

the front end can be any language you like. Having said that some automatically generated words (like posted for example) will be in english. It is very easy to create your local language file though.

OK. Let me try to ‘resolve’ some of the issues from above first…

gour · 2013-01-17 11:38:20

springworks wrote:

Welcome to Textpattern!

Thank you!

In short: Yes. Textpattern is wonderfully adaptable to a wide range of different scenarios. The community here is very friendly and helpful and there are a wide range of useful plug-ins (extensions) that can really add to the power of Textpattern to enable you to make some quite complex sites.

Great. I’d just like to see a bit better organized ‘plugins’ site in order to be able to discern what is alive/usable or orphaned/obsolete etc.

I’ve set up a private area on a charity website I created using Textpattern and a number of plug-ins. Although this was a single, shared private area for members of the charity only, I don’t see why the idea couldn’t be extended to offer individual private areas, based on login name, groups, etc.

Nice, just wonder how much PHP skills is required to do it.

PayPal cart integration is certainly possible to handle shopping, again, this is something I have done before. It all depends on what your requirements are regarding products, payment processing, stock control (if any), etc.

Do not plan to use PayPal (bad experience with them), but just to have simple cart where clients can order our ‘products’ (aka services) and be informed how to pay via e.g. Internet banking to our account. Later, we may want to have custom form-based payment method (ala PayPal) for authorizing credit cards via some payment gateway.

Overall I find Textpattern to be a very capable and powerful CMS. It’s way beyond a simple blogging engine, though, of course, it can do that too.

Well, I’ve to find missing pieces to make it decent blog engine for the beginning. :-)

springworks · 2013-01-17 12:16:40

gour wrote:

Nice, just wonder how much PHP skills is required to do it.

Well, I didn’t need to dig into PHP at all for my implementation, I just used a combination of TXP native tags and ign_password_protect. I also used mem_form and mem_simple_form (along with copious use of TXP variables and conditional logic) to put together a simple sign-up mechanism for members to be able to sign up to online rotas to help at events. It works very well and is easy to use, which is a good thing as most of the volunteers are extremely non-technical!

To get more finely-grained control over user access and permissions to private areas, I’d take a look at smd_user_manager, cbe_frontauth and cbe_members to start with and see how far I could get with those.

springworks · 2013-01-17 12:22:56

gour wrote:

Well, I’ve to find missing pieces to make it decent blog engine for the beginning. :-)

What about archives, tag/category clouds? Any concrete plugins?

For archives, take a look at upm_date_archive, I’ve used it successfully on TXP 4.5.4 to give monthly archives.

For tags and category clouds, take a look at tru_tags and arc_popular_category_cloud to see if either one will suit your needs.

philwareham · 2013-01-17 15:54:37

A Croatian language file could be created on the RPC server, it’d need someone who speaks Croatian to translate the language strings initially – but once it’s done it’s available to everyone for the future (it would need some extra translations from time-to-time as any new language strings are added to the system).

uli · 2013-01-17 16:35:58

gour wrote:

I’d just like to see a bit better organized ‘plugins’ site

It’s currently undergoing an enourmous overhaul behind the scenes, but that’s completely done by volunteers in their spare time. Nevertheless: probably noone around who wouldn’t agree with you.

But everyone using TXP can help with this by simply posting in the appropriate topic her/his issues, workarounds, discoveries, background knowledge, be it as small as “tried to hopple the glob, but no fun. The plugin doesn’t work with v4.5.4, error popplopplomm while klopping the blobb”.

BTW, Phil, on the tin we say Croation is currently available. No dark red “Translator(s) needed” label underneath. Is that an outdated statement?

gour · 2013-01-18 08:14:30

springworks wrote:

Well, I didn’t need to dig into PHP at all for my implementation,

This sounds almost too good. :-)

It works very well and is easy to use, which is a good thing as most of the volunteers are extremely non-technical!

Interesting…and I like it.

To get more finely-grained control over user access and permissions to private areas, I’d take a look at smd_user_manager, cbe_frontauth and cbe_members to start with and see how far I could get with those.

Maybe I should start with my private site (small WP blog) and see how it goes before venturing into more serious issues…

gour · 2013-01-18 08:17:20

springworks wrote:

For archives, take a look at upm_date_archive, I’ve used it successfully on TXP 4.5.4 to give monthly archives.

That’s good to hear. I installed that plugin, but didn’t know how to use it…Will try again now knowing it should work with 4.5.4.

For tags and category clouds, take a look at tru_tags and arc_popular_category_cloud to see if either one will suit your needs.

Thank you very much…will report about my success/failure. :-)

gour · 2013-01-18 08:19:22

philwareham wrote:

A Croatian language file could be created on the RPC server, it’d need someone who speaks Croatian to translate the language strings initially – but once it’s done it’s available to everyone for the future (it would need some extra translations from time-to-time as any new language strings are added to the system).

Well, I’m the one who assumes knowing Croatian, although due to using English so much, I believe that now I know neither Croatian nor English. :-D

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#1 2013-01-17 08:44:21

is Textpattern for me

#2 2013-01-17 10:22:23

Re: is Textpattern for me

#3 2013-01-17 10:50:37

Re: is Textpattern for me

#4 2013-01-17 11:32:46

Re: is Textpattern for me

#5 2013-01-17 11:38:20

Re: is Textpattern for me

#6 2013-01-17 12:16:40

Re: is Textpattern for me

#7 2013-01-17 12:22:56

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#8 2013-01-17 15:54:37

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#10 2013-01-18 08:14:30

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