CMS Week - TextPattern - The Art Company's Blog

Gosh, already Friday? Time flies! We're nearly at the middle of our CMS Week article series. On the menu today, we have another « flexible, elegant and easy-to-use content management system, designed to help overcome hurdles to publishing online, and to simplify the production of well-structured, standards-compliant web pages » (that's what the website says): TextPattern. Ready for your daily CMS dose? Let's go.

What is TextPattern?

When it comes to publishing on the internet, beginners and experts alike are met with a bothersome paradox: word processors and graphics applications allow anyone to do a pretty good job of managing text and images on a personal computer, but to make these available to the worldwide web – a seemingly similar environment of documents and destinations – ease of use vanishes behind sudden requirements for multilingual programming skills, proficiency in computer-based graphic design, and, ultimately, the patience of a saint.

Packing together features like browser-based template and CSS editing, unlimited site sections, unlimited site authors, seamless import from other CMS, pre-publishing or multiple languages support, TextPattern aims to solve this delicate problem and offer to the web published an effective content publishing and management platform. And for free, since it's GPL'ed.

What's in TextPattern?

TextPattern, like the majority of these packages, needs the usual PHP/MySQL to run (however the requirements are pretty low — PHP4.3+ and MySQL 3.23+). The installation comes with a wizard that runs after the traditional download-extract-upload exercise. This wizard is simple and straightforward, despite an unpleasant surprise: it asks you to manually create a configuration file and upload it in a specific folder. Once done, your site is setup is a couple of clicks — too bad for the manual step!

The admin module looks a bit outdated, from a design perspective (honestly, I felt like playing with an old version of ICE/SAP…), but it's clear and well organized. Setting preferences and bouncing around the features side is pretty straightforward. If you are unsure what anything is there are little contextual help buttons next to each item. Everything is well laid out with tabs for the sections and suchlike. It looks a little formal but everything works as it should.

TextPattern supports multiple blogs, which it calls "sections". Each section is customizable, but they all share the inventory of images and articles and categories. So it’s easier to cross post, and easier to maintain since everything is manageable from the same location. It supports categories, without any "killer-feature". Its search engine works well, much like any other. You can create and link static pages, too. There's quite a few plug-ins, for example to implement a CAPTCHA on forms or to manage a spam-fighting service. Finally, you get the traditional RSS/ATOM feeds on articles, comments and categories.

TextPattern doesn't have a real asset manager. Rather, it considers everything as an asset: images, links, photos, files and documents. These assets can then be used in articles, templates or straight HTML, through the use of a meta-language called Textile (Textile is a lightweight markup language that allows you to write valid XHTML using a simple syntax that vaguely mimics the Wiki syntax).

Speaking about templates and themes: TextPattern does not offer a lot of themes, and the one supplied by default is quite… minimalistic.

Setting up new themes requires that you the online template editor, which is part of the admin interface. Getting used to it is a bit difficult and requires patience. Also, switching from one theme to another involves a number of steps that would deserve some rationalization.

Another big issue with the theme engine is the way is stores the templatethat is stores all the presentation data (page, form and stylesheet) into the database. But not the various media files the theme relies on. So you're left with pieces of the templates that are not handled when you edit it. This also prevents you from having a simple method to replicate a theme between a test and a production environment.

The stylesheet editor is great, however, and let you switch between the plain CSS code view and a more formal view categorized by classes.

The documentation found on the website is quite complete, but leaves some aspects in the mist. Hopefully, TextPattern’s support forum helps you find all the help you need. There's quite a lot of experienced coders there helping people out.

Main Features

Quick text to XHTML conversion with Textile
Up-to-the-minute visitor/referrer logs
Browser-based template and CSS editing
Unlimited site sections
Unlimited article, link, file and image categories
Browser-based file and image upload & organization
Fast intuitive editing of articles, links, comments, page elements
Posting, editing & design privileges hierarchy
Unlimited site authors
Browser-based plugin installation and maintenance
Import content from other content management systems
Articles can be set to appear at future date/time
Password-protect site sections, or even specific articles

Strengths

Lightweight and fast
Easy installation (except the manual step)
Multi-blog
Strong community
Great potential to grow

Weaknesses

No XML/RPC support
No trackbacks
Outdated admin interface
Confusing and clumsy template engine
Incomplete documentation

Conclusion

To be honest, we found TextPattern a bit rough around the edges — after playing with it, you feel that there is space for improvement and that it still has a way to go till maturity. As a blogging tool, it falls down on some fundamentals; as a CMS, it misses some essential features (no API, not great on themes, categories could be better,…). But it has a lot of potential for moving up the ranks to really compete with other solutions. So maybe not the one you'll adopt now but certainly the one you should keep an eye on. Definitely.