Textpattern Marketshare

marios2 · 2020-05-21 13:29:29

According to Datanyze Textpattern has a marketshare of less than 0.01 percent and ranks in the 94th position.

What is laughable though is, that the number of websites which are hosted with it are 267 in total.
( Are you serious?)

What is your take ?

Is it because Txp attracts only the best of the best?
Did Textpattern loose the train?

Regards.Marios

colak · 2020-05-21 14:00:45

We had many discussions here about it but I can only repeat my view. The problem with txp, is its strengths. ie, its versatility. When visiting a WP site, you immediately recognise the engine that runs it, but also the templates used, txp sites are not recognisable unless you start digging. WP, has a front end login which is also recognisable. Furthermore wp’s free hosting paradigm boosts its presence. I would think that the data from Datanyze are gathered from the meta tags. For my sites I always include <meta name="generator" content="Textpattern CMS"/> but I’ve seen many txp sites which do not declare it.

uli · 2020-05-21 14:10:42

What is laughable though is, that the number of websites which are hosted with it are 267 in total.
( Are you serious?)

When you do a G search for “Be guided through your Textpattern first steps by completing some tasks?” (from Textpatterns default article) you get 159 of these. 267-159=108 real websites made with TXP? I’d not trust that figure.

Bloke · 2020-05-21 14:20:01

Haha, about 67 of those sites are ones I’ve been involved with :)

Txp has a lot to offer, especially now themes are a reality. And as far as I know, Textpattern is the only CMS that can eradicate the staging server, offering unparalleled development speed on a live host.

The new tags and attributes that Oleg bestowed in 4.8.x are so insanely flexible that it blows my mind sometimes. Some of the stuff that took lines and lines and lines of plugin code can be done in a 10-line set of core tags in a custom shortcode Form. Your own tag to generate your own markup that can even be used inside article bodies if you wish (smd_textile_bar supports shortcode insertion).

As we evolve themes and open the theme store, things are just going to get better and better.

I took a simple WP site a few weeks ago and ported it to Textpattern because the owners couldn’t fathom how to update the WP content, nor update the site after their developer left. I logged into their WP site and the admin side was, frankly, a fucking tip. I’m surprised anyone could find anything. And it was s-l-o-w.

On the Txp site, I improved the way the templates were organised, reduced page bloat, made the pages more navigable and search engine friendly, and gave them a login to the Txp admin side. They’re really pleased with how simple it is to just write and get content up.

And Txp is rocket-propelled. That same site, with roughly the same content, had a pagespeed score of about 25 mobile/55 desktop on WordPress. Running on Textpattern it scores 99 mobile/100 desktop. Txp is blazingly fast, which equates to a fantastic user experience.

Honestly, anyone who can evangelise such benefits outside of these walls will help. I’m gradually introducing more folk to it; turning people one mind at a time, as Morpheus says :)

marios2 · 2020-05-21 14:35:40

Well, … if you do the math, und assume, that 6 million websites use a CMS ( Which I suspect should be a value much higher) and multiply by 0.00002, you get 120.

But I would estimate anywhere in-between 3,000 and 15,000.

marios2 · 2020-05-21 14:46:23

Haha, about 67 of those sites are ones I’ve been involved with :)

Yes that’s laughable, indeed, haha.

The new tags and attributes that Oleg bestowed in 4.8.x are so insanely flexible that it blows my mind sometimes. Some of the stuff that took lines and lines and lines of plugin code can be done in a 10-line set of core tags in a custom shortcode Form. Your own tag to generate your own markup that can even be used inside article bodies if you wish (smd_textile_bar supports shortcode insertion).

Yes, that’s a story that needs to be told!!!

And Txp is rocket-propelled. That same site, with roughly the same content, had a pagespeed score of about 25 mobile/55 desktop on WordPress. Running on Textpattern it scores 99 mobile/100 desktop. Txp is blazingly fast, which equates to a fantastic user experience.

In fact, …the speed-comparison statistics are included in an article that is in the database I gave you.
( As we say,… Lamborgini,… versus Volkswagen Beatle )

You now understand the wickedness of my post.
( In fact, I was just waiting for your post to come )

C’mon Bloke, poor some more oil on the fire, haha!

Regards.Marios

Last edited by marios2 (2020-05-21 14:53:40)

jakob · 2020-05-21 15:07:30

(the number was larger: if you search for the PHP upgrade error, you find a lot more defunct textpattern sites).

A bit like what Yiannis mentioned, my feeling is that Textpattern offers great flexibility under the hood but that it is not as accessible for the “average user” to make their own site with. That’s hindered it’s take-up on the one side.
At the same time, you don’t need to be a programmer to customise and optimise considerably. That’s the beauty. With Wordpress, there’s a huge choice, but if you want to adapt something just a little and the theme doesn’t support it or there isn’t a widget-plugin for it, you need to get out your PHP screwdriver.

That said – and we’ve had this discussion umpteen times before, especially with Bert – I’ve never thought “world domination” was something to aim for. A bigger user base, yes; a larger circle of contributors, yes; but otherwise small is beautiful.

There are now 100s and 1000s of CMSes out there for all kinds of developers and they are increasingly quite good. Many will disappear again and I’m thankful to everyone here that 16 years down the line, I’m still using TXP with as much enthusiasm as I was in the beginning :-)

marios2 · 2020-05-21 15:21:43

There are now 100s and 1000s of CMSes out there for all kinds of developers and they are increasingly quite good. Many will disappear again and I’m thankful to everyone here that 16 years down the line, I’m still using TXP with as much enthusiasm as I was in the beginning :-)

Perfectly said. We are so happy, that TXP has had a continuous uptake in its codebase for those 16 Years.
I am very happy also about 4.8 ( This is a milestone, especially with the Theme Feature. Worked perfectly well on my install. )

Bloke · 2020-05-21 15:35:05

Glad to hear it, Marios.

World domination is definitely not on our agenda. If we had the user base of WP, we wouldn’t be able to cope! Steady adoption by discerning designers and content crafters who want something fast and better and flexible and different from the all-things-to-all-men players out there, is the name of the game.

colak · 2020-05-21 16:52:19

marios2 wrote #323107:

We are so happy, that TXP has had a continuous uptake in its codebase for those 16 Years.

Ahem… 17:)

gaekwad · 2020-05-21 19:55:36

marios2 wrote #323097:

According to Datanyze Textpattern has a marketshare of less than 0.01 percent and ranks in the 94th position.

That link currently says ~2.7 million sites and 70% market share for Wordpress. Both of these are inaccurate. Wordpress powers about a third of the web in total, about two thirds of the web where there’s a recognisable CMS, and there are wild estimates as to how many websites there are overall across all server and languages and whatever…over 1 billion? Over 2 billion by now? Who knows!

philwareham · 2020-05-22 09:00:29

Short of us forcing the header response or meta generator tag to declare Textpattern is powering the website (which we would never do, as we believe in the security and privacy of our users), there is no way to reliably find out how many sites are powered by Textpattern. But my own estimates put it at around 10,000.

We can gauge some usage via download stats from the main Textpattern.com site. FYI 4.8.0 (which released 25th February 2020) has had 1,849 downloads as of today, so that’s over 600 downloads a month – not too shabby. However, this still doesn’t give much reliable info as:

Some people download/use the software from other sources too, such as directly from GitHub, or via a cloned repo.
Some people of course download and play with, but don’t use in actual production, Textpattern – for evaluation or just out of plain curiosity.

Anyway, as previously mentioned in this thread, as long as we are still here and making a product that people still use and like, that is good enough in my opinion. Obviously, the more people that discover our lovely CMS the better (and I fully encourage anyone to promote the CMS to others as much as they can). I don’t really use Textpattern very much at all in my paid day job these days (my job role has evolved over the years), but I still like to develop it as much as time allows – and I like the community that has built up around it – so I won’t be leaving anytime soon (if ever).

Many CMSes have come along – and indeed gone – in the time Textpattern has been here, so its staying power is quite remarkable I think. And the current devs are the most approachable and enthusiastic we have ever had, in my biased opinion. 😀

One thing I do notice in the web dev community is a lot of people seem to jump on the next ‘shiny new thing’, just because it’s new and they want to be seen as cutting-edge or progressive. Sometimes those technologies stay but a lot of the time they don’t. And a fair bit of the time the technology is actually worse than what came before it.

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#1 2020-05-21 13:29:29