Joshuaink: What's your poison?

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What's your poison?

Thursday January 13, 2005

I had an email yesterday asking me why I chose Textpattern as a CMS. A difficult question to answer with any authority, had the license fiasco with Movable Type not been in full flow just at the time I was investigating choices I would probably be using that in all honesty. It was really the uncertainty of what I was going to do with this site that lead me off in search of a truly free CMS; had I decided to turn this site into more of a portfolio site, I didn't really want to get lumbered with a fee for doing so.

I tried WordPress and Textpattern primarily, and ended up choosing the latter simply because I got along better with it. It seemed to get me where I needed to be faster and with the least hassle. Interesting then to see that Tom Werner has gone the other way, very specifically choosing WordPress over Textpattern. I guess it really is down to what you feel comfortable with, as each seem to have their pros and cons.

Recently, I have started thinking about Expression Engine for commercial work and this is mostly because of the enthusiasm Colly has for it, and then also reading about Veerle's experience with it. This in itself tells me a little about how I truly feel about Textpattern; I do love it to bits and would highly recommend it for personal sites but I am starting to think that it may not be quite mature enough for use on commercial projects, though I suspect in the future it is going to be a serious contender.

There are no doubt a few people out there who think you should build your own CMS and that is indeed an admirable thing to do. I have a slight problem there though, I wouldn't know where the fuck to begin, so that really is not an option for me at the moment.

I see that many people who visit here do use Textpattern, and that is no great surprise, but not everyone, and it begs the questions, why did you choose the CMS you did? What was it that made it more appealing that the competition?

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Ray

1323 days ago

I was looking for a free CMS as well, and, honestly, I think I stumbled upon TxP. I decided to try it out and got involved in the forums asking questions. That’s what made me choose TxP—the great help from other users in the forum. Most notably, Kenneth Love of eyeheartzombies fame. He was an extreme help to me. Yeah, I know. You were looking for reasons not endorsements, but he deserves the praise for helping me.
John Oxton

1323 days ago

Sounds reason enough to me Ray, the TXP community is very special!
jolo

1323 days ago

Actually I’m amazed with Textpattern, after trying it live on OpenSourceCMS, but I landed into wordpress coz’ I feel much comfortable with it. & yap its about comfortability, just getting along. I feel contented now with wordpress but as time goes by, who knows. I’m planning to switch from wordpress to textpattern on my next redesign. But I’m not taking down wordpress and use textpattern just because a lot of “famous” bloggers use TP, I just saw the ease and potential in using textpattern. I’ll just momentarily stick with wordpress.
Mike Stenhouse

1323 days ago

I’ve been meaning to either rewrite my site or turn the back-end over to TextPattern for quite a while but I’ve not had time. TxP seems a little bit more hackable than WordPress and is free, unlike a serious license of MovableType. I’ve not put that much research into it though… And I’ve never heard of Expression Engine! I’d be very interested to hear why people chose what they did.

At the moment I use a dynamic database editor I wrote a couple of years ago, which is a bit like phpMyAdmin but more user- and less admin- focussed, on top of an XSL/ASP hybrid front-end. It’s clunky but it works.
Stefan

1323 days ago

I think Wordpress (which I use) is good if you use only a blog and some links. With Textpattern you can easily create different sections with many templates. But Wordpress is IMHO more advanced at this time, Textpattern is a very early version, and many features are not yet implemented. But I thought about switching to Textpattern. Maybe next version.
Shawn Grimes

1323 days ago

Well in all honesty, I use WordPress because it was suggested by quite a few people when I was trying to choose between MovableType and WordPress. I didn’t see one mention of Textpattern so I didn’t even know about it until I started browsing various blogs. I’ve been pretty happy with it thus far, but I will more than likely set up a test install of Textpattern and give it a spin because it looks to have a lot of great features with a ton of room for improvement.

What is it about Textpattern John that makes it more comfortable for you to use?
Tom

1323 days ago

WordPress, I didnt like the “feel” of textpattern. I chose WP over MT because I feel at home with PHP.
John Oxton

1323 days ago

I think Tom has kind of answered Shawn’s question for me. As I remember it (though I may be wrong) getting stuff to happen in WordPress was about adding syntax that was not unlike PHP includes. Textpattern on the other hand uses an XML style syntax. Given that I don’t really do PHP but I do do XML, it fitted nicely.

Again casting my mind back to trying each out, Textpattern seemed to be the fastest and easiest to set up. If you forget about clean URL’s and go for messy, TXP takes about two minutes to set up (though I think even clean is getting easier to do). The default template sucks though! WordPress has the key advantage there, especially with the ever so cool Kubrick template
Jared Christensen

1323 days ago

I kind of “fell” into TXP as well, being on the search for a free CMS after my botched install of Movable Type left my site in shambles. My fault entirely, but MT is a cruel mistress.

I really picked TXP because of the Admin panel and XML-ish syntax. So easy to understand. The hackability/custumizability of TXP is both a pro and con, though, and the package has a ways to go as far as stramlining and documentation go.
Peter J.Lambert

1323 days ago

I started out on Blogger, and then moved to MT, which I completely wrecked beyond repair. When my hosting company lost my home directory, I saw it as a good excuse to change, so I went with Wordpress. I’d been with WP for about a year when I got fed up with it and started getting tons of comment spam.

Then, just before Christmas I moved to Textpattern because it looked as good as if not better than Wordpress, and somebody had told me it didn’t have the comment spam problems.

I’m only just getting to grips with it but I can tell already that once I’ve found my way around it and learnt a bit more PHP, it could be very handy for non-blog / commercial sites.

Oh, but I haven’t got Clean URLs working yet.
Jamie

1323 days ago

I used to use MT a few years ago but found it heavy on the server. I’ve tried out TxP but just didn’t gel with it for some reason…sometimes a application just doesn’t suit your way of working, no other explanation.

I’e been eagerly awaiting the release of TypeWorks (and was offered a press trial version) but on Colly’s recommendations I’ve been testing out Expression Engine instead, in the hope of using it on client sites in the near future. So far I’m very happy…the main feature that grabbed it for me was the custom fields option. There also seems a great community behind it and most of all it seems stable enough for me to have the confidence to use it commercially, which TypeWorks, for the near future anyway, doesn’t have IMHO.
Craig

1323 days ago

TXP of course. I tried ‘em all. Pmachine, MT, WP, and a few more that I can’t recall the names of. TXP had what I was looking for. I wanted a small, simple, section-able CMS. At the time that I chose TXP, WordPress didn’t allow multiple sections without installing it multiple times. To me that’s rediculous.

I still think that MT has the most configurability but it is just too damn big (file size wize). I’m super anal about disk space, and MT just doesn’t cut it.
paul haine

1323 days ago

I was using Movable Type, but wanted to change because I was sick of having to learn Movable Type syntax and rebuilding my pages every 5 minutes – and the spam, of course. I tried Wordpress and Textpattern, and liked them both, but Wordpress felt more developed and I liked that it used PHP for its template tag, rather than its own system.

(By using PHP, learning to use Wordpress helps you learn a transferable skill – learning Movable Type only allows you to say that you’ve learnt to use Movable Type.)

I’d try Textpattern again quite happily, one day. I’m also interested in what Typeworks is going to end up like.
paul haine

1323 days ago

Gagh, there was meant to be a Typeworks link in that comment. John, just so you know, my place of employment is blocking the ‘Textile’ link you have here (apparently it’s a ‘message board or club’) so if I were a new user, I wouldn’t be able to work out how to use it.

Going off topic now, but I really dislike Textile. I don’t understand why writing "linktext":url is any way more ‘humane’ than writing it in HTML. Seems to just be an attempt at re-inventing the wheel.
Narayan

1323 days ago

I’m in the process of switching over to EE for both commercial work and for my personal site, which is undergoing a major overhaul. MT Pro, when it surfaces, will likely rival EE for features.

On the whole, I’m very enthusiastic about EE. I really have no problem paying for a tool on which much of my work depends, and the sheer amount of work and care that the pMachine staff have put into their product shows.

That said, the UI in EE can a little confusing (they would benefit greatly from hiring a UI consultant), and some of the tags and modules are not implemented as thoroughly or with as much continuity as perhaps they should be. I’ve been keeping track of such instances, though, and progress on them is always being made.

I checked out WP and it just wouldn’t work for me. TXP looked great but was (and perhaps is) in even more of a nascent stage of development than EE. The names TEXTpattern and WORDpress really kind of highlight the core focus of those packages—text—whereas I was looking for something a bit more flexible in terms of the media it would handle. I can’t say EE is there yet, but it’s definitely heading in that direction.
teli

1323 days ago

Well, my first experience ever with blog software was MT and it sat dorment on my site because I couldn’t get a grip on customizing the templates and the rebuilding – killed me.

I found Wordpress by chance and was ever so glad I did. I installed, customized, and had my site live within 3 hours and I knew from then on, I would definitely be using Wordpress.

While Wordpress isn’t a hardcore CMS, it can be hacked up pretty dern good to emulate one (had to for one of my most recent projects)...however, I plan to redesign by portfolio site using Textpattern because I like it’s organization and its ability to use different templates without needing to set mod_rewrite rules.

I won’t give up Wordpress completely, however, I am very much open to TXP.
John Oxton

1323 days ago

@ paul I agree to some extent that textile is annoying when you know HTML. On the same token if you are not a web dude, then textile is easier to get to grips with.

I have actually just done someone a blog using Textpattern and I choose TXP specifically because of how textile makes it really easy to write half decent mark-up, which I might add seems to work much better in the text editor than it does in the comments.

I guess it would be nice to have the option to offer limited HTML in the comments but I can see where textile is coming from.
Turnip

1323 days ago

“There are no doubt a few people out there who think you should build your own CMS”

I think it greatly depends on the situation. I had a good look at the range of free CMSes available a little while back, and like Jeffrey Veen I concluded that they all pretty much suck. For Digital Proof I decided to write my own. That worked out pretty well because I had a good handle on what was going on, and it wasn’t too complicated. However, if I was making something more complicated, writing my own CMS would take aaaaaaaages. So I dunno.

A good CMS should be transparent; it shouldn’t be obvious to the user which CMS the website is running, and the developer should have to freedom to twist it and turn it in every way he or she likes. At the same time, the CMS must not be bloated. It must not have every feature under the sun, but it must have the capability of every feature under the sun. It needs to be extensible and customisable. It should help the web dev write the site, rather than writing the site for the web dev. I haven’t seen one like that yet.
Andrew Hume

1323 days ago

I had a look at TXP some months ago for a project, but decided on sticking with WP just because I knew exactly how to do what I wanted with it. I didn’t want the learning curve of a new CMS. Simple as that really.

My blog is currently running WP 1.5 (latest beta) and it does have some significant differences over the latest stable release (1.2). Yet to receive any comment spam either, although it’s early days.
Nathan Pitman

1323 days ago

I chose Textpattern for my blog becuase Drew told me it was kinda neat. :)
Feaverish

1323 days ago

WordPress just seemed more mature than TxP, with a larger community, and Molly’s article on switching to WordPress kind of sealed the deal for me.

Seeing the beautiful things that could be done with WordPress didn’t hurt either.
Schultzy

1323 days ago

Mine is just a crap access database with content in it with asp making it into a page would have made one in mysql and php but could not afford the hosting lol.

Well thats it realy
Colly

1323 days ago

Expression Engine lets me do ANYTHING I need it to – either for a blog, a magazine site, a full-blown CMS – anything.

Enough said. People will start thinking I’m on commission. Ahem…
Joen

1323 days ago

I actually started out with Movable Type (3.11?). This was a direct consequence of working with it on a client project. I was pretty excited about this, partly until I started getting random errors that were very difficult to fix, not to mention the licensing fiasco.

I switched to Wordpress, because that, to me, was “the obvious choice”, and because Michael used it very nicely.

I liked this a lot over Movable Type, mostly because 1) I didn’t get random CGI error messages, 2) I didn’t have to CHMOD every uploaded file (let’s not discuss this), and 3) PHP is much easier to work with than CGI.

In all honesty, had I known about TextPattern, I probably would’ve gone with that—it does seem to be nicer to work with than Wordpress 1.2. On the other hand, Wordpress 1.5 (previously 1.3, i’m using a nightly) will be so_bloody_great that there’d be no discussion.
Anton

1323 days ago

Switched from WordPress to TextPattern (as you well know).

WordPress was/is an amazing bit of blog software. But I wanted to go beyond that. To have more than one page, with more control over style. That’s where TextPattern comes in. The versitility is what sold me.

Granted, the learning curve is a bit different, but I’m starting to “get it”, and will have a robust site back in place in no time.

Thank YOU for everything you’ve done to help me out so far.
Roger Johansson

1323 days ago

MT here. I started using it in October 2003. Why? I found it reasonably easy to set up (I did have some initial problems though), and there is a lot of info and many plugins available for it.

I’m still on version 2.65. It works for now, and while I have looked at other options, I’m a bit hesitant to invest the time it will take to transparently move everything to a new platform.

For me to even consider anything else, it has to work on Mac OS X, so I can have a local dev version for testing stuff. Actually that’s one of my main reasons for not upgrading to MT 3 – I can’t get it to run on OS X. At least that was the case last time I tried.

I had a look at WordPress, but I didn’t really like it. Not sure why. Maybe I’ll take another look at it.
Matthew

1323 days ago

I used to use a custom ASP engine that was something like a blog without features. It served me well for several years, but I decided to find something more robust. I first looked at Drupal, but never actually tried it. I test-installed WordPress, but found my test-posts littered with spam a day later. The inability to create sections didn’t impress me either. I considered MT, but didn’t want to pay for it and the setup baffled me at the time.

As I continued to explore Blogland, I found sites, like this one, running TXP and gave it a shot. I was impressed by the interface, the extensibility, the supportive community, the versatility and so much more. I was sold on it pretty quickly. The learning curve was odd, but once I got around it, I found that TXP was pretty easy to fit into my style of CSS design. It’s a great piece of work, and I’m looking forward to the next version, and to designing more sites around it.
Isma

1323 days ago

I’ve been building my own CMS for months now. I just wanted a general aticle publishing tool as a plattform for more complicated client projects. It all started with a simple jpg uploading and resizing php class and now I’m improving the templating system. I also happen to find easiest to hack my own code than others and it seemed like a good challenge to harness my skills. I’ve tried TXP though, and it looks slick and easy. I couldn’t even install MT (complicated CGI paths on my hosting) but I’m still very courious of all the fuss about it.
Erwin Heiser

1323 days ago

The reason I’m now learning to develop a site with Textpattern is that the interface is just so good to work with for non-tech people who just want to add content to their site.
I’m tired of clients mailing me they’ve changed a “few lines” using Frontpage and then having to trail through that editors crap code to get it back to valid XHTML. So that’s why ;-)
Tom Werner

1323 days ago

The only real beef I had with TextPattern is that, at the time I tried it out, it lacked the full-featuredness that WordPress already sported. TXP is a fine CMS, but seemed to require a little more attention. Also, the plugin architecture was (is?) wack.
Scott Hughes

1322 days ago

TypeWorks is supposedly going to be released sometime within the next few decades. ;)
Zara

1322 days ago

As silly as it sounds I think I went with Textpattern because Dean wrote it and I wanted to support it because I liked reading his site. At least that’s probably why I tried it initially. I had used MT before and it was fine but the rebuilding sucked. Textpattern was easy to install and I liked it. Plus I love PHP so it just made sense for me to use something that used PHP. It has some rough edges but it also has a killer community. Oddly I found out about Textpattern before I had ever heard of WP (which I’ve still never used)
Veerle Pieters

1322 days ago

@Roger Johansson: If memory serves me right EE is being developed on Mac OS X. So it runs perfectly to test things local. I’m with Colly on this one EE does everything I want, you have to think outside the blog box, EE is a full blown CMS that almost has no limits. The pMachine staff has their soul in their product and it shows, I even received support in the weekend. The next step for me will be to move my blog EE if time permits that is ;-)
Kev

1322 days ago

I started off with Nucleus which is a good, basic CMS perfect for my first sally into blogging.

As my needs grew I needed something more advanced and looked at a variety of solutions. What influenced my final choice for WordPress was that I’ve heavily hacked a number of Invision forums in the past and was thus more familiar with that syntax style. Plus it has excellent spam management features.

Tom

Isma

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