When it comes to content management systems, there are plenty to choose from. I’ve worked with Textpattern, Drupal, Mambo, Joomla, WordPress, and Textpattern. The reason I mention Textpattern twice, is because it has often been my first choice since early 2004, and often has been the second choice that got the job done when the first choice failed its mission. In that regard I look at Mambo and Joomla with evil, teary eyes. But Textpattern usually never let me down.
Do you still love me, Bundy?
But lately I’ve been unfaithful to Textpattern. I started looking around for alternatives, and ended up having several “aha” moments with WordPress. Only downer is the use of php in its template system. I also had a look at ExpressionEngine, but the world is still waiting for the revamped version 2.0, and I don’t feel comfortable stepping into a commercial CMS in these economically uncertain times. Clients may start demanding free open source to be used, and maybe EllisLab, the company behind ExpressionEngine will struggle in the coming years. According to my fave financial analytic dude, Peter Schiff, the US economy is going DOWN. I’ve had too many emails recently from companies shutting down some or all of their services. And were still in the early stages of the financial bubble! And the bailout will only make it worse in the end. Okay, back to the subject…
Grandma’s Fridge – Smell it?
I believe nobody is being “unfaithful” without some kind of good reason or at least valid motivational factors being present in the situation. My situation was simply that Textpattern is not born with core user self-registration features, which plays out in lack of proper e-commerce solutions, and little general use in these times of social networking fellowships being all the rage. Additionally, I felt Textpattern smelled more and more like an old, abandoned fridge. Why? It just plain simply lacks momentum. Momentum is a term also used in financial trading (= pet personal interest of mine lately) and indicates the direction and force of the direction, in either direction.
Textpattern vs. Wha’ever
For textpattern vs. WordPress, please look at Google Trends. Hmm, the momentum of WordPress is so ‘uge that Textpattern can’t be seen as anything else than a bottomline flatline. Let’s compare it to ModX and ExpressionEngine. If you put Drupal in the ring, it becomes clear that Drupal is a shooting star, no less.
Crockery
When Crockery, the codename for Textpattern version 4.1 was announced, it was also stated the current version 4.0 series would be the stable branch. Between the lines I read that to mean something along the lines of; new features can be deferred to Crockery, and we’ll “maintain” the stable branch. Which has proven to be a correct assumption.
As a result, Textpattern has not gotten any notable facelifts since it’s inception, and new features are far in between.
Sub-sections, unlimited categories, native tagging, are long lost, highly wanted features, and maybe they will come, someday.
Instead, the upcoming version 4.0.7 will feature a new tag parser, whatever that is. I am sure it is a very welcome evolutionary step, but how about a UI overhaul to keep up with current standards? I’m not a bimbo, but I aint no geek either, and it is difficult to create buzz and momentum revolving around a new tag parser. Many users, like me, don’t care what is under the hood, as long as it’s good.
Textpattern releases are very stable, but I find them to far between eachother to keep up any momentum.
Leadership
Matt Mullenweg founder of WordPress and Dries Buytaert founder of Drupal, are true visionaries and leaders. Textpattern was created by Dean Allen, a quiet bookcover designer / typographer, who has rarely been seen in real life, nor online. I once saw a couple images of him on Flickr, but that’s all. Hardly a leader. Maybe that was why he abandoned work on Textpattern, and let some other geeks work on it instead. And here the real trouble began, in my opinion… I will not name any names, but talk about asocial people being in control of Textpattern, for a few years, until lately some more open and friendly people got in charge (it seems – they’re still not quite people magnets). However, not much new can be seen from the outside. Work goes on inside the community, but a redesign of Textpattern.com, which has been long overdue since 2004, has not been implemented, even though community efforts to write copy, design and code was done with good energy. Why did it stall? Apparantly because of the leadership or lack thereof. Wauw huh? It’s almost like Dean never left. Like Scientology, who in every outlet worldwide has an office ready for L. Ron Hubbard, for when he returns!
The Long Tail of WordPress
I’m writing this on my iPhone via the WordPress iPhone app. Why does Textpattern not have such an app? Designers love both Textpattern and the iPhone. I know I know, I can blog via the iBlogger app. But it is not optimal, and not as functional as the WordPress app that just rocks, with its perfect support for tags, categories, drafts, multiple sites, offline-mode, photo integration – it rocks! And Matt Mullenweg has indicated later version of the iPhone app will also include stats and comment control. That – is – truly – WAUW.
But, you may say, Textpattern does not have as big a community as WordPress. And that my friend, is due to… Momentum. Who will blog about a tag-parser? Who will read it? Will a client understand it? No, a client will on the contrary, be amazed with the new, über functional design of the streamlined UI of the now ublic beta WordPress 2.7. Momentum my friend. Can you feel it?
Has anyone ever carved a Textpattern pumkin for Halloween? Now that’s what I call momentum!
And, for now, I promise not to talk more about momentum for the next few days;-)
PS: I’d like to note that the Textpattern community has long been the gold standard for me, when it comes to friendliness, so no hard feelings in that direction.
“Later, he created Textpattern, without which WordPress wouldn’t exist. Later, he created Textdrive with Jason Hoffman, without which WordPress wouldn’t have found an early business model or had a home on the web. He brought a care and craft to everything he touched that inspires me to this day.”
RIP D.C.A.
Hey Morry
Yeah, sad to hear that. Thanks for commenting – I hadn’t heard the news.
Oliver
I am in the process of moving a friend’s website. His wife mentioned WP and I suggested TXP. I had used a couple of times for when I organized conferences for my organization ( I had to use open source software). A google search on comparing the two brought me here to your review. TXP is now up to version 4.6.2. So there seems there is some momentum in the venerable CMS.
I am reluctant to move him to WP as the frequent updates could prove a challenge for him. (I recall moving a restaurant’s site from WP to EE because of updating issue would often break their WP site). I am favouring TXP as I think it will give him a fairly easy platform for him to do his writing and to promote his book and sales. For the selling part he will use PayPal. The one issue that may prove challenging is the categories limitations. Will depend if we can consolidate and heavily edit his old site. I haven’t tested WP for some tiem now but I feel more comfortable having him use TXP.
PS. Thanks for your review and comments
Hey Morry
Thanks for chiming in! I love to hear from “Textpattern’ers” – it has a huge place in my heart as the best lil’ CMS / website platform I’ve ever used!
Contrarily, I’m having a growing dissatisfaction with WordPress, which to me is looking more and more like the “Joomla of 2017” – aka a platform that’s a “has been”. Had been cool, but not it’s becoming more and more bloated, as needs have evolved over the years and therefore most WP users rely on plugins for everything – even things that should have made it into “WordPress core” many many moons ago. F.e. Meta Title and Meta Description, and removal of the /category/ base – which is ALL I’m using the gigantic Yoast SEO plugin for. The rest is bloat and just adds cognitive (and server) overload.
What I wanna say with that, is that I feel there’s plenty room in the market for another CMS to take over. Could be cool if Textpattern got momentum in the “last round” and beat WordPress:)
=)
Oliver
“…I feel there’s plenty room in the market for another CMS to take over.”
Craft CMS is where it’s at these days.
Thank you for all this information.
Now you can continue with the CMS saga 🙂
A fine start posting with an illustrative discussion. And a funny one to read, with Messiah, bin Laden and the new Carlsberg receipe in it.
There is good reason to go with txp. The momentum at WP to me looks more like breathlessness. Always bigger, better, faster – for what reason?
Is spam a problem for textpatternistas? No, it is not.
There is not every Application possible in txp. Well, Robert gave the right answer in his comment (1): .. I suspect there’s nothing which would discourage anyone from building one if she sees a business case in it ..
Conclusion: If you are calm, if you wan’t a small, fast and stable CMS – give txp and its calm community a try.
Good Article. Pleasant to read AND informative. Uncommon for this day and age. Think i might stick w/ WordPress though. Drupal is awesome, but far too complicated for my needs.
I’ve stuck with WordPress since I wrote the blog post. Been very happy doing so.
Recently I tried Textpattern on a small project, just for the sake of research and nostalgia. It was okay, but the WordPress ecosystem is far superior. Whatever your problem in WordPress, just Google it, and there you are. Home free. With Textpattern, everything is so scattered. Plugins, plugin support, info on a plugins compatibility, is it still maintained: Frustrating.
So, one of my new year resolutions for 2010, is to ONLY use WordPress. Not windowshop for alternatives like TXP, EE, Drupal, Joomla, FireRift or whatever.
WordPress is amazing!
Have a good 2010!
Thanks for the nice coverage of this whole situation with textpattern. I’m on a verge of updating my site, that I haven’t touched for couple years. And was thinking if I should stay loyal to textpattern or switch to something different. And here I just got confirmation to my doubts about textpattern. I do remember when it was hot and had momentum. But those days are long gone. I’m not the guy who would switch to the newest and hottest CMS over there. But web is growing and there is so much going on. Textpattern is the same as it was 5 years ago. And it’s not the worst part. The scary part that it will be the same next 5 years. I think I will look more into Drupal. WordPress is cool, but it’s changing too fast to my taste and it has too much noise around it with all the plugins and themes. I think drupal is more solid foundation and more of a true CMS than WordPress, at the same time it is very easy to extend and customize. Thanks again for advice.
The social revolution of the web, with communities, which transformed into social networks, and things like Twitter and a multitude of aggregators and mashups, requires a CMS that is flexible (which TXP is) but also has the ability to let users log in on the front-end, and participate in various ways. Textpattern is stuck in the realm of “We Publish – You Read” one-way communication (apart from comments) because it can’t do anything else.
That said, for a magazine style site, it can be a good choice, but so can WordPress and Drupal.
Drupal can do anything. Literally. WordPress can do amazingly much because of its momentum (plugins, great documentation, and tutorials around the web) and theme hackability. And it has something Drupal doesn’t – easy hierarchical pages. For a company website that is nice. If one want’s to do flat, tagged “non-hierarchical” that’s easily done with posts. Power via simplicity. Nice!
Textpattern has one section, and two categories. You can only go two levels deep, which is a limitation.
Having used Drupal myself for a few projects, I think it will make you happy. Especially if you know a little PHP, since the templates requires you to know some.
I would recommend you install Acquia Drupal edition, since it comes with all the essential must have modules of Drupal, including image handling modules, CCK for custom content types, etc. Then you can activate those you need and leave the rest alone. There’s also a package that sets up a local server on your computer, so Drupal runs locally. Drupal is very easy to move from local install to online afterwards.
http://acquia.com/downloads
Now such goodness is not something one would see with Textpattern, huh?
Thanks Oliver. Actually I already have some experience with Drupal. I’d say it has some disadvantages compared to WordPress. The main one is that it takes some time to wrap your mind around it. It is somewhat of a big piece to swallow at once. But once you get it, and get comfortable with CCK, you are pretty much unstoppable. WordPress starts easy on you, and then you can extend it with plugins depending on your needs. That’s the reason behind it’s momentum. Drupal scares some people away. But I totally agree with you – it is much better to start with Acquia – http://acquia.com/downloads
I will get back to working on my site. Now my imagination running wild and my hands are itching to make something new and nice.
Cucumbers and porn stars aside, all of the things that people have wanted throughout the years have been added, and if they weren’t someone usually provided a plug. Sure there’s still a few things missing but a project like this (wp and other open source cms included) is always going to be a work in progress. Regardless of the degree of momentum – it is still moving forward and therefore never truely finished.
As a txp -> wp -> txp again kind of guy. I do agree with you that the dev end of txp seems to lack momentum – but what it lacks in momentum is not what it lacks in quality. For personal use, I prefer wp, but when you’re actually trying to do something that isn’t just a run of the mill blog – txp takes a leap and bound past wp.
Moral of the story, txp still has a way to go – but the potential it has makes me want to wait and see 😉
Hi Brandon!
I totally agree that Textpattern rules over WordPress is some areas. Currently I’m at work optimizing my WP installs, since I find saving posts, and page load in general rather slow. It might be due to bloat.
So when I update some of my clients sites, that were built on Textpattern, I am truly amazed at how fast they run. Boom, saved. Boom page loaded. I also totally clicked with TXP template tags instead of ugly PHP.
Which is why it makes me somehow sad to see how Textpattern is slowly but surely fading into the horizon. Development is rather stale.
If Crockery (4.1) comes out, with a brand new, more efficient interface, and a lot of the modern, need-to-have stuff implemented, like tags, multiple categories, etc, yes, then Textpattern might return with a vengeance, but with the downward momentum, it will end like the Commodore Amiga and Betamax video tapes – on the tech graveyard. Period. Even though it was superior in some aspects.
The reason? Lack of momentum.
I’m a bit late in a the game here, I know.
I have to agree and disagree, annoying I know, but here goes.
I disagree that Textpattern is going stale, or that it’ll end up in the tech graveyard, because there are always clients who simply don’t care about the tech stuff. They want a website with their info on it, they want to be able to edit that info. That’s it. In some cases they even prefer (wait for it) Indexhibit, because of it’s simplicity and lack of features. Crazy talk I hear you say.
For the tech obsessed, sure, Textpattern isn’t going to be enough, and you’re right, it currently isn’t keeping up with the pack, but that’s not a reason to write it off. It does a job and does it well. Like Voltaire supposedly said, better is the enemy of good.
With regards to the whole Dean Allen “he’s not a leader”, “he won’t get famous” thing, well, I really, REALLy don’t think it;s important. At all.
So yeah, agree and disagree. Good article though.
Nah, you’re not late, only good to hear from you Duncan!
My comments on Dean Allen is not at all targeted at his potential for fame, but rather his potentials as a leader. Steve Jobs made Apple what it is today. I see Dean Allen more like Steve Wozniak – without Woz, Apple would probably not have been conceived, and without Dean, Textpattern wouldn’t either. But to bring it forward, a visionary *leader* is needed. Like Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.
Dean Allen’s background as a book cover designer and typographer, instead of “mere programmer” made Textpattern unique and wonderful: An interface that is different than most other content management systems, because it works the way I, as a non-programmer wants it to: Forms, easy-on-the-eyes template tags, clean XHTML output, textile, etc.
But a leader he was/is not. I don’t care about his fame. But to take any project further it needs a leader, who can… lead the project in the right direction. So that followers (ie. developers and users) knows where to go, so to say. With him, it was always more a play of incognito silence, abrubt announcements, more silence, and then he left Textpattern.
Then in came Mary and Zem… and thankfully they left again…
Indexhibit is cool! I like simple tools as well. It’s all about accomplishing what one wants to achieve, in the fastest, most efficient way possible.
Textpattern vs. Wha’ever
Oliver, some of your arguments use an outright wrong presupposition. Google trends for example do not quantify quality. Using the same logic why don’t you try porn vs ecology?
Of course Google Trends does not quantify quality. Did I say that? But who wants to develop plugins for a platform that seems to be stuck in the mud? Who wants to develop such a stale platform into something better, or more useful? Without momentum, things die.
It is interesting nevertheless, to see porn is on the rise, while ecology isn’t really gaining much momentum compared to porn, even though most cucumbers are bigger than most of the male actors otherwise impressive reproductive organs. Anyway, thanks for pointing it out to me.
Sad fact though. And almost as sad, that WordPress vs. Textpattern looks very similar: http://www.google.com/trends?q=textpattern%2C+wordpress
I have always preferred WordPress. Most of my websites are running on WordPress, and only a couple was (yes, was) running on TextPattern.
Well Nancy I think I’ve already given plenty of reasons as to what I’ve been missing with Textpattern.
If you feel happy and content with what you have in Textpattern I don’t think you should switch, but I’ve found WordPress to be surprisingly good, and the development pace is amazing, the eco-system is amazing as well. So many themes, so much and so good quality documentation that I feel right at home already.
Your post fails to give adequate grounds for concerns about a lack of momentum. Many great pieces of software are little known, slow to change.
sure, if you're talking about software in general. but we're talking about web technology, which is constantly changing.
i was a huge follower of TXP for the past couple of years. i've written little blog blubberies about TXP's superiority over EE and WP, ordered copies of the TXP book for our local library, written a few simple plugins and helped out on the forums.
but in the end i kind of feel like i've wasted my time learning a CMS that has no staying ability minus for a very small community that doesn't seem to be growing at all.
there are only 2 developers left on the team. mary stepped down ages ago for whatever reason. more major plugin authors like netcarver (mlp pack) and rob sable (every single rss_ plugin that are basically essential to TXP) have left for greener pastures.
i actually just started using wordpress a week ago without really knowing anything about it and i must say i really don't know why the majority of TXP folk are so anti-WP. theres a little PHP involved, big deal. i would say learning a bit of PHP is definitely much more helpful then learning proprietary TXP tags.
TXP has always been trying to push itself as a CMS for web designers and yet the default backend is atrocious, design and coding wise. there have been MANY attempts at revamping this and yes there are a few admin themes available, but in the end, TXP just refuses to change due to its adamant stance on not wanting to break upgrades.
honestly, having 2 categories as a limit for each post and the built in limit of 10 custom fields should have been fixed AGES ago. in order to get around this you have to use rss_unlimited_categories, a plugin the original author abandoned years ago and the unlimited custom fields plugin by gerhard which costs you a fair 20$ but should be unnecessary if TXP itself was actually fixed.
anyway i still like TXP, but i simply cannot justify spending more time on a system that doesn't seem to have a stable future at all.
Gerhard > I’m not very PHP-wise, so thanks for sharing your views on that side of the equation. It certainly points as to why some aspects of Textpattern appears to stale.
Boogenstein > Comparing beer to web developent? Do you use beer to produce? Beer is for consumption. Textpattern is for production.
The thing is, the world of tech moves quite fast, probably because the web is a rather young medium. There are plenty of room for improvement in Textpattern, I already went into that in my blog post;-)
Yeah, I totally agree. Tags, unlimited categories, unlimited custom fields… Stuff that should all have been implemented years ago, to stay current and competitive.
As an update let me say I'm really happy using WordPress (and Drupal for bigger projects). WordPress has so much going on, coming soon is version 2.8, and I feel like I just updated to version 2.7 – and there are so many goodies in those updates!
I’m a little puzzled by your need for momentum. If it works well, why worry about what might come? I don’t see you worrying about Carlsberg not having a new recipe yet!
The problem is PHP. You could argue with me about it, but I know this because I’ve built one of the bigger plugins floating around, glz_custom_fields, the unlimited custom fields one, and oh boy was it tough work.
Object Oriented support is inexistent, there’s no framework to simplify things (only functions that want to mimic a framework), no testing (rspec hallelujah), nu proper plugin support (you have to hunt them down, nothing like gem for example) and the list can go on. If Textpattern was built on something like CodeIgniter or Django or (double yes for this) Rails, I wouldn’t be replying to this post now.
As a developer/designer that has built all kinds of websites with Textpattern and has been fiddling with TXP plugins for a long time (glz_custom_fields is just one of the bigger plugins that I’ve written, the rest won’t be made public because it’s just too much hassle), I have been frustrated in many ways (both as a coder and as a user) and the answer to all this is simple: port it to Rails, re-write TXP from the ground-up and keep it’s functionality because that’s the 1 thing everyone agrees on.
Destry > Okay okay, maybe I was a bit harsh on the weird’ol Dean then… I’ll pour some sugar somehow soon…
Yep, the eternal Raveoli himself, all these nicks around the web =)
Lee > ModX, yeah – the totally rewritten version is now in public alpha (beta?) and while I find it’s not for me, I certainly think it packs some punch. It gets some attention.
Imagine if Crockery was also out in public beta now… That would be exciting as well. But, no… Still Textpattern is stuck with maximum two categories for each article, one level deep sections, it bugs me… Textpattern could be so much to so many people.
LOL! I just came across that post of yours in the forum and realized YOU’RE RAVEOLI!! Had I realized that to begin with (knowing you’re a long-timer), I wouldn’t have given you the Dean Allen history as, of course, you know already. 🙂
Dean’s not a messiah, and I don’t see him that way. I think Dean would even tell you himself he’s not a leader and doesn’t care about giving speeches (which makes your attack on him kind of pointless). What Dean is is a talented writer. I like talented writers and that’s why I defend him. Simple as that. All the other stuff he’s given to the web is just freebie I use (and happen to like) but could, if necessary, live without just fine, including Textpattern.
I have to agree. Textpattern definitely suffers from a lack of momentum. I’ve been waiting so long for the next release I feel like I’m on the trailing edge of things. Don’t get me wrong: I love the product, and I realize it’s likely a labor of love for the developers. But are we ever going to see the next release?
I’m involved with a half dozen sites running Textpattern, one of which will be be the new incarnation of a popular metro-area Deaf community site.
But as I contemplate the launch of yet another site, I find myself being drawn more and more toward MODx. Sorry, Textpattern, but you need to do your business or get off the pot.
Destry, livetalks equal public presence. If you think hiding away in the furthest corner will make you famous (as in, gaining momentum) then I must tell you, it only ever worked for Bin Laden;-)
I’ve used Textile for years, and Markdown as well, and been very happy using it. I know Dean created Textile. Who doesn’t? And more importantly, have I ever discredited him for creating Textile? No.
TextDrive… Don’t even go there, I had a client with them, and he had trouble with them even a year after he got his refund for an extremely poor experience. If I had to choose between Jason of TextDrive and Jason the horror movie guy, I’d choose the latter, because the former is just plain rude to people (people, check the forums).
I find it rather amusing that Dean has this apparant Messiah-like status, so that most of the comments I get on this blog post (and in the Textpattern forums) are semi-religious-like defence of the highly venerable Dean Allen, who I’ve only named in a bypassing paragraph. I was talking about him in the past tense, so take a chill pill.
Thank you for your comment anyway;-)
It’s all just words and freedom of speech;-)
Sadly, you’re not using Textile. Sorry about those links.
Dean Allen is more of an influencer than you give him credit for, but if your only measure is how many live talks he’s been to, then you don’t get it anyway.
Dean Allen is the original developer of Textile, arguably the most popular markdown language on the web and since implemented in nearly every major programming language, and benefiting nearly every CMS (including WP).
Dean is founder and former president of TextDrive (now a Joyent company), which he conceived under a risky but brilliant funding strategy that made it a huge success in a fraction of the time most other businees can only dream of. Sure textism.com was pretty much Oliver-focused for a while, but you don’t have a lot of time to blog and knob-polish at conferences when you’re busy running one of the most successful web hosting companies going.
Dean provided some of the earliest articles to A List Apart when it was just past it’s mail list stages; something Zeldman himself, “wrote about recently”:http://www.alistapart.com/articles/tenyears.
He’s back to blogging pretty regularly at textism.com. His site navigation sucks, so it’s hard to find other tricks of his like “Favrd”:http://www.textism.com/favrd/, but that’s Dean, he’s a maverick, a minimalist who doesn’t have to self-aggrandize because he doesn’t give a fuck what you or I think anyway. I like and respect that, personally, and so do many of the folks who make those speaking rounds you allude to.
You can say Textpattern doesn’t have a leader, or whatever, other people have made the same claim, but that’s got nothing to do with Dean Allen, hasn’t for a long time.
Thanks Robert – I’m already a follower.
But you must admit he’s not quite an industry influencer?
He is and was mostly vocal on his dog (incidentally also called Oliver;-) movies and whatever. Not the visionary thinker who speaks at universities, Google talks, TED talks, web developer / web 2.0 conferences, etc…
That’s not criminal, but it is not something that makes a project take off and gain momentum.
Oliver, regarding Dean Cameron Allen’s online presence I’d like to bring a quite lively http://twitter.com/textism to your attention.
Regarding the iPhone Application, I suspect there’s nothing which would discourage anyone from building one if she sees a business case in it, just like Effigent did theirs for WordPress.