Lets Try WordPress

My initial thought was WordPress, I had a bit of experience with it from Shirts That Matter (which I have yet to complete…) so it seemed like the logical choice; However, I just kept running into more and more problems, and needing more and more plugins (which didn’t always work as promised).

Lets Try Textpattern

So I started to think Textpattern, one of my secret mentors (secret as in: I stalk his blog but he doesn’t really know who I am), Nathan Smith, co-authored an amazing book called TextPattern Solutions. I pre-ordered the book through Amazon as soon as he mentioned it but never really got around to reading it until now (now that I needed his TXP wisdom).

It was a bit difficult! I definitely didn’t pick up on Textpattern as quickly as I picked up on WordPress, I spent few late nights staring at my MacBook with a puzzled face. It did however pay off, Textpattern is extremely customizable, The thing I like most is how the “Articles” work, you can post them anywhere—so it took me just a couple minutes to make my resources section completely dynamic, which is huge for me!

The Breakdown (Pros and Cons)

There are a lot of things I like about both, and I always find it easier to compare things with bullet points, so here’s a breakdown of my pros and cons for the two:

WordPress

Pros

• Beautiful! The Admin interface is very intuitive and aesthetically pleasing
• Themes are easy to make and copy
• Easy Plugin Installation
• I can use my favorite HTML editor and just upload the files

Cons

• You can only have one blog and post entries to that one blog page
• Very buggy, I ran into several oddities with the navigation and a few other minor things
• A lot of plugins with a lot of false promises and bugs
• Not very flexible

Textpattern

Pros

• Amazing Article system, you can post articles anywhere and use Forms to present them as you want them presented
• Very flexible, there’s even a case study in Textpattern Solutions about an entire eCommerce site built off of TXP
• Amazing Plugins – I had no problems installing / using plugins on the fly

Cons

• The admin interface is a bit unattractive
• Bigger learning curve
• I’m not a huge fan of Textile yet

Conclusion

Well, I hope you found this helpful – I did not start out to become a Textpattern advocate but I feel that after building my website/blog in WordPress and then in TextPattern I’m sold on it.

Note: Building my site in WordPress and then rebuilding it in Textpattern happened in the span of a month, using WordPress 2.2 and Textpattern 4.05.

Also, if you’re going to use Textpattern, buy Textpattern Solutions.

Note: As of version 2.7 I decided to revisit WordPress and there are definitely a lot of improvements. I am now using WordPress to power this blog.