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.

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!

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.

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.

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?

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.

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