Fantastic comparison. You’ve managed to say what I’ve experienced. I started blogging MovableType a few years ago. I love the syntax, but hated rebuilding my posts every time I published.

After a while I switched to TextPattern. I loved it’s speed and simplicity, but felt that I didn’t get the joke. I simply couldn’t get my ahead around the model that TextPattern was built around.

So, I came crawling back to MT. But since have switched back to TxP, then finally after rolling out WordPress for a client I decided to take the plunge. The “migration” was painful, but worth it. The fact that WP stores things in physical files makes life so much easier.

Interesting post Natalie full of great information. I have used WordPress in the past along with many other CMS’ but none have compared to Textpattern for ease of use, templating and customisation. I really think its a great all round CMS.

The problem I find with WordPress is that it seems to be great at doing blogs, but not much else. I find the sectioning and categories in Textpattern to be a lot more friendly toward creating an actual full blown site.

You fail to mention which you are using unless I mis-read, but I’m pretty sure its WP! Good read. :)

Have you considered using Symphony21, which stores it’s data (posts, pages, etc…) in xml files, and it’s css in literal .css files?

Symphony has many times the extensibility of textpattern and has a fantastic admin interface.

It should be mentioned that it’s the user’s choice to keep the CSS in the TXP database. You can easily link to it from anywhere, which is what I do.

Losing your files, layout or otherwise, in a DB crash or accidental deletion is bad, to be sure, but most webhosts offer ways to get in and regularly back up your database (PHPMyAdmin comes to mind). Heck, TXP even has a plugin to make it dead easy. Backups are critical for everything, not just your home PC.

That said, I do find TXP’s small textareas a real pain to work in. My #1 wish is that TXP would make its admin area standards-compliant so I could style, resize and adjust it to my own needs.

I’m biased, but ExpressionEngine is the CMS to learn. The learning curve is a little steep at first, but once it clicks, you’re sold. Dare I also say EE is the “designers choice” given that folks like Happy Cog, Airbag, Mark Boulton, Veerle, 31Three, Erskine and more choose it over everything else.

I was thinking about learning a new CMS, too. But after some hard research I decided to stick with Wordpress. I also use Movable Type and recommend that one very highly. The most recent MT version is a little clunky in my opinion, though. I was looking at Ruby on Rails powered CMS (Radiant and Mephisto) thinking that would be an easy way to learn ROR. It turned out to be harder than I expected and they seemed to be underdeveloped compared with the vast Wordpress knowledge base. I was thinking about learning TextPattern, but your comparison makes me think Wordpress is still the right choice for me. Do you use MarsEdit? Check it out if you haven’t. It is a standalone app that lets you post to your blog. I absolutely love it and rarely make a post from a web interface anymore!

Oh, and I use Wordpress regularly for commercial sites and would argue with the commenter that doesn’t think it does much more than blog. It is very versatile, especially when paired with the right plugins.

EE is your new bicycle. No questions asked.

Though, I am quite biased.

Ahh yes. I do love it when a post about cms’s/blogging engines go up and the slew of random EE fanatics come rushing in to recommend their engine ‘no questions asked’ without any regard to what the post is even about. That’s the only problem I have with EE. The actual cms is great, but the fanboys are probably the most annoying to deal with. They seem to be convinced that EE is a complete and unique experience even though building sites with EE is very similar to Textpattern.

As for Wordpress vs Textpattern, honestly as much as I’d like to vote for the underdog, I think it’d be a better idea to stick with Wordpress. The backend of TXP is severely outdated (the design, the markup, the fact that once javascript is disabled you can’t even use it!) and this fact will NOT change any time soon. TXP development time is extremely slow and at times doesn’t even feel like anyone is manning the steers at all. Something must be amiss when the lead developer of TXP at the time (Alex) left the project to work for Wordpress a little less than a year ago.

Meanwhile, as much as I don’t even like Wordpress, it as least has a solid, stable future with very active development, financial backing, has an actual business plan, roadmaps, an exponentially larger community for support and plugins, etc etc while TXP developers seem to be just fumbling along with no real goals, ideas, roadmaps, or anything that would lead you to believe that TXP is actually being developed/improved/etc etc. Fundamentally, the latest stable release of TXP has not changed in over five years!

TXP users and developers will tell you nothing has changed because they believe its better to have a ’stable’ version of TXP. They claim that major improvements are to be set in a new version named Crockery.

Ahh yes the subject of Crockery. Supposedly “Crockery” (aka TXP 4.1) is the version where the markup for the backend is updated, subsections and unlimited categories will be implemented etc etc but don’t hold your breath. It is pure and complete vaporware thats been ‘worked on’ for years upon years with no signs of progress. You can check this yourself by looking at svn (dev.textpattern.com) except of course thats been down for weeks upon weeks as well.

As for Symphony cms? Don’t even bother. It’s a developers platform that has a stylish backend, but takes a ton of more work to actually get anything done with it. To date, I still haven’t seen any Symphony-powered sites that go beyond brochure-level that could easily be built using TXP, EE, or Wordpress in a cinch. Symphony users keep claiming that XSLT is the language recommended by W3C, but the reality is its just far too abstract to bother with for 99% of users out there. Especially for front-end designers!

So, people in the end, do yourselves a favour and just stick with EE or Wordpress or some other major player in the game. TXP is a dead/dying platform that has no means of improvement, funding, goals, or even a respectable size of a community to live for much longer.

Personally I would go with something like EE. It’s very similar to Textpattern but much more powerful, is manned by people who can code AND do business to insure their stability and place in the CMS world, has an actual decent backend, and with the imminent release of EE 2.0, it will continue to gain in popularity (not that popularity has any connection with quality, as can be seen with bloatware Joomla! but it does give you a good indication of whether a platform is worth learning). Meanwhile TXP users have been dwindling more and more and are moving on to other places where their respective futures are much brighter.

Sidenote: Author profiles are dead simple in TXP – just create a section and post bios as articles with the author’s full name as the title. With profiles as articles, you can reap the benefits of custom fields, article images, and body and excerpt fields. In an article form, use something like this:

By <a href="<txp:site_url/><txp:section name="staff"/>/<txp:jmd_author lowercase="1" real_name="1" separator="-"/>"><txp:author/></a>
<txp:hide>
    Title: "Joe Schmoe"
    URI: http://example.com/staff/joe-schmoe
</txp:hide>

I’m going to wave a flag for EE, too. If you need help with the learning curve of it, give a shout–I’m happy to lend a hand.

God, your blog designs are simply amazing. I haven’t visited in a while and I was just floored when I saw the new design. You keep coming up with new ones and they keep impressing me.

On a more related note to your post, I found the side by side comparison very useful. I have used textpattern for a few sites and wordpress for a few others in the past. I even read that textpattern book, wow, was it long, but very helpful. Lately, I have been using wordpress almost exclusively just because it has a lot of plugin support, but some of the limitations on outputting code that I want irritates me a bit when I try to do things wordpress isn’t used to doing.

I thought about trying expression engine, but I don’t think I have the time to learn a new cms so I am going to take a look at textpattern again. It has been about 6 months since I used it.

Well, first of all, WordPress does have a momentum right now. Everyone is crazy about the next release, new improvements, etc. I love WP for what it is, and if a site is not far too complicated, I’d recommend it for novices as well, although the php templating language might be a bit scary first.

There are a couple of things one CMS does (or at least seem to do) better than the other, and I think it’s always the goal of the site that should decide which to use. There is one thing you did not mention in your absolutely great article, Natalie, and that is the use of custom fields. WP users don’t really bother much about it, many of them do not even realize what that is, and why it sits there on the “Write” page. What TXP offers here is unbelievable: there is a site I have done that’s using 10 custom fields to input different data which are then styled very differently when it comes to displaying the data. Without this solution, it would be almost impossible to do that particular job.

Anyway, it’s just an addition – I don’t think TXP is dying, or that the quality of a CMS depends on the frequency of new versions. Different goals – different CMSs, that’s the motto.

Excellent write-up. Very fair and balanced. Interestingly, as a front-end designer (not nearly as good as you, but still) I find Textpattern to be much easier to design with and for than WordPress except for what you mentioned about not being able to use Text Mate.

Textpattern is still very much active and the SVN has not been down. It was moved to Google Code.

http://code.google.com/p/textpattern/

and here is a list of the recent changes

http://code.google.com/p/textpattern/source/list

Im currently using TXP but am in the “which to use” state at the moment and im finding it a lot harder after looking at the latest version of wordpress, really impressed so far!

I find that the templating system is a breeze in TXP, I can design Using dreamweaver, panic, wordpad or whatever I decide to use and when i’m done with exactly how I want it I just paste it in and add a few tags, it seems (to me) one of the easiest precesses, and I link to an external css file for easy updating too.

BUT as mentioned above, textpattern development has slowed and i’m finding that certain things I think should be included in TXP just arent (Sub sections being one).

The main problem though (and I cant stress this enough) is that I dont feel confident enough with the TXP admin area to give it to my client, they just dont seem to “get it”. WP is much clearer and I know that with WP I can log them in and they seem quite happy with whats going on.

The reason this give me such a headache is for some reason, despite all the bad press about TXP at the moment, I cant seem to put it down. There are still so many people using it out there, on sites that I visit all the time , I’m conviced its still the platform to use. (Big up to Sam Brown – yes its your fault!)

However just for info, i am keeping an eye on the TXP fork “Xpattern”

I quote

xPattern is an open source fork based upon the 4.0 dev branch of Textpattern. It’s goal is to improve the application to better fit the needs and desires of the community at large. The biggest change you will notice in the initial release of xPattern will be a redesigned admin interface and the loss of a few letters.

So it sounds hugely promising.. just need to hurry up and get a beta out for testing :)

My next step is to look at EE (despite all the costly addons which are free elsewhere). I skimmed over the admin area for a few minutes and found it a bit confusing to say the least so I left it, im sure like TXP once I get past its lurning curve it’ll be a great system to use.