Why Textpattern

philwareham · 2011-06-11 09:34:06

Also when i ask around about the system, a lot of folks said that textpattern is outdated

Not sure what that means, since Textpattern essentially is a collection of logical and easy to use tags which you use a building blocks within your website, the final website is as up-to-date as you want to make it. Think of it as lego for PHP.

I always code my sites in the latest HTML5 standards and TXP has never had a problem with that. For example, this site is powered by Textpattern.

Biofobico · 2011-06-11 11:34:17

maruchan wrote:

bq.. Wordpress, ModX, CMS Made Simple

Aimed at a different type of web publisher, too enterprisy for average sites, unaesthetic (respectively).

I have put all three of them in front of my clients, and I still maintain several ModX and CMSMS sites. They’re not terrible, but if you’ve ever rolled out ProcessWire, ModX’s resource tree looks comparatively like a giant pointless headache for the client. And CMSMS is just sloppy, once you start installing plugins with their own ideas of interface design. I spent much more time customizing CMSMS than I wanted to…

To say nothing of Joomla, Drupal, Pivot, SilverStripe, Concrete5, Frog, Wolf, and so on…

Now there’s some bias for you. :-)

This is why i looked at Textpattern as a “minor” system. As a designer i eat with my eyes a lot and textpattern isn’t that appealing in this matter.

“Minor” vs. “Major” is for CMS newbies, sorry. But it will cause serious regret. The default admin theme is incredibly easy to change — have you tried it?

Also when i ask around about the system, a lot of folks said that textpattern is outdated and the only ones using/caring for it are the elitist devs/users (not my words here).

Who cares what somebody else says? Software is a personal choice.

IMO if you are not looking for a “minor” system and you’re creating small-average websites, you’re probably making a mistake.

All valid points in there, but as i said im a designer guy, so i always look to the designer perspective first. But this topic was not intended to start a flame thread about wich systems are the “best”, only to get some thoughts about it by the real users of it.
When i meant “outdated” i was taking others words and comparing to other systems who release updates every “week” as opposite to textpattern updates (i see this as a good thing).

hcgtv · 2011-06-11 12:07:17

Biofobico wrote:

Wordpress is a pain for me because the template system its contra-productive (for me at least) and having php messed with jquery and html its not eye friendly.

That alone should make designers think twice about using WordPress, but on this forum, we seem to have these discussions quite often.

Rather than ask Why Textpattern, designers should be asking Why not Textpattern?

The main gripe I hear from people is that Textpattern looks ugly compared to WordPress. Yet we have quite a lot of admin themes to choose from, Hive Reloaded being one of the latest, or you can roll your own. Personally, I like the clean fast loading admin side of Textpattern, on any device I may use. When WordPress comes out with Just Write, you know people are complaining about all the glitz of their backend.

When you get past the shock that is the spartan look of the backend, you gain an appreciation for the elegant template tags. I’ve converted many an XHTML template into a Textpattern theme, and the speed that it renders the site is amazing, something Google and the rest of the search bots much appreciate. I’ve read of many a WordPress site being brought to it’s knees from a Reddit or Digg mention, even Expression Engine has had it’s issues, while Textpattern weathers heavy traffic pretty well.

Textpattern, after all is said and done, is just a tool to create a finished product. It’s this product, the website, that should be the deciding factor on what tool to use. Do a view source on a Textpattern driven site compared to any of the other CMS competitors’ dynamic output, and you’ll grow to appreciate the tool. Isn’t that the reason FrontPage got such a bad rap and people flocked to DreamWeaver?

Zanza · 2011-06-11 12:08:21

Biofobico, it’s hard to tell if TXP is aimed to you as a designer. It depends on the way you like working. TXP isn’t “visual” in the way it works, but it’s easy to do any visual layout you need. But if you want to work “drag&drop”, it’s not for you. If you are comfortable working with html/css and are keen to learn a very simple tag language (far simpler than php, to say), it can reward you with unlimited design power.

The problem with txp is that it need you to work textually, to produce visuals. Some people don’t like that. CSS work like that, too. And some “visual” people have hard time getting CSS.

It’s not a matter of how much you can do (a lot!) or if the basic theme is outdated (it is, but no one use the basic theme), of if it is “niche”. It’s a matter of understanding how it works, and if it fits to you. I never felt limited on visual design, as I’m good at working with very simple textual code and markup, even if I think visually and I’m not a programmer. So it really depends on that, I think. Maybe you have to try to tell.

Biofobico · 2011-06-11 12:11:57

philwareham wrote:

bq. Also when i ask around about the system, a lot of folks said that textpattern is outdated

Not sure what that means, since Textpattern essentially is a collection of logical and easy to use tags which you use a building blocks within your website, the final website is as up-to-date as you want to make it. Think of it as lego for PHP.

I always code my sites in the latest HTML5 standards and TXP has never had a problem with that. For example, this site is powered by Textpattern.

Very clean design. Like it a lot :)

And that brings me to my next question; “Textpattern best practices”
Im enjoying textpattern a lot but i always find myself working on the backend and making code changes there. I know we should do what works for us, but i always use textmate/espresso for all of my coding, and its a strange feeling do the copy/paste thing and then work only in textpattern.
Its the same with you guys or you have a secret? :)
Also im going to convert all my designs to HTML5 using the awesome HTML5 boilerplate and i want to ask your advices on best way to convert my actual code to HTML5 and then make it “work” with textpattern.

Thanks all for the patience.

Zanza · 2011-06-11 12:26:33

To work with text editors you may try this. Never tried personally (yes, I work from inside textpattern) but I think lot of people use it happily. Follow also last pages of the thread.

redbot · 2011-06-11 12:44:24

Zanza wrote:

To work with text editors you may try this. Never tried personally (yes, I work from inside textpattern) but I think lot of people use it happily. Follow also last pages of the thread.

Or, for a lighter approach, install the itsalltext extension for firefox.

philwareham · 2011-06-11 14:14:39

If you can wait until tomorrow, I’ll send you this theme which us based on h5bp. It’s in no way an end product bit a good starting point for editing into your own site. You might also like my brand new hive theme which makes the admin side a bit easier on the eye.

As for coding, I use coda which has a few txp plugins available, along with subversion, finally copy/paste to textpattern.

Biofobico · 2011-06-11 15:11:19

philwareham wrote:

If you can wait until tomorrow, I’ll send you this theme which us based on h5bp. It’s in no way an end product bit a good starting point for editing into your own site. You might also like my brand new hive theme which makes the admin side a bit easier on the eye.

As for coding, I use coda which has a few txp plugins available, along with subversion, finally copy/paste to textpattern.

Of course i’ll wait :) thanks. I have coda also but im unaware of anything useful related to textpattern.

philwareham · 2011-06-11 16:13:07

There’s a coda book for textpattern, txp syntax highlighting and a collection of txp related clips all available online. I’ll post links to where to download them when I’m next near my computer.

maniqui · 2011-06-11 16:24:21

cnk_versioning (Zanza already suggested it) is a must-have for TXP development, imo, particularly if you want to use some versioning system like Git, Mercurial, Fossil, or SVN.

philwareham · 2011-06-11 18:29:02

Righto, I’ve bundled up some Panic Coda files that help make writing TXP stuff a little bit more streamlined. Included are the Textpattern Book, Textpattern Syntax Mode and a collection of Textpattern Clips – the readme.txt contains info about how to install. Enjoy…

Download here

…use that in conjunction with cnk_versioning as mentioned and you’ll have a great coding environment.

PS. to take full advantage of the syntax mode your files should have .txp as the file extension.

Last edited by philwareham (2011-06-11 18:32:10)

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