Learning to Love Textpattern

First things first, I’m coming from a computer science background where I’m comfortable covering every detail of web development front to back. With Textpattern, the first thing I had to do was accept that I was going to have to relinquish the level of control I’m used to having and embrace the constraints.

That being said, for simple sites, Textpattern is amazing. If you’re the type that likes to control every detail of your site, your posts, your archives, etc., and you don’t know or like PHP, Textpattern probably isn’t right for you.

Elegance & Simplicity

Once you wrap your head around how Textpattern organizes everything, it’s amazingly well thought out. Yeah, “forms” are really more like “includes”, and “sections” are more like “blogs”, but the seperation of presentation, style, and content is wonderfully clear.

Plugins

With most systems, it’s necessary to use plugins, but with Textpattern, they were an absolute must in order to get past some of the simplistic tags. This is where the simplicity of Textpattern borders on crippling flexibility. Without these plugins, I would not be using Textpattern right now.

• glx_if lets me have back a little bit of that lost control through convenient conditional statements.
• low_discuss generates the rel=”nofollow” tag.
• sgb_url_handler gives the URL’s a little bit of added flexiblity. I’m not using it here, but I plan on using it when I move YourTotalSite over to Textpattern to gracefully handle inbound links to pages that will no longer exist.

Hacks

Despite my hope that I could completely avoid PHP, I did have to make some very simple and basic changes to the values that Textpattern spit out with some of it’s custom tags. This was straightforward once I knew which files were doing all the dirty work. (Pun intended.)

In addition to this, I prefer to have my comments field come before the personal info collection, and Textpattern has the tabindex values set in the PHP, so I had to redo those as well. Not difficult, but probably more effort than it should be.

Validation

While I’m not a validation stickler, if it’s easy to make your page validate, you should do it. The most disappointing thing for me was that Textpattern’s comment form does not use labels by default. Is it really that hard? Then, after I added the labes, the page would validate because the Textpattern tags that generate the input fields do not output the id attribute.

Unfortuantely, the solution involved some slight tinkering with one of the afore-mentioned PHP files. This is something that I’m guessing most would not be comfortable doing. It was a very simple change to add the id attribute to the function that created the HTML input fields. It was simple and harmless enough that it should probably be done by default.

Conclusion

Textpattern is elegant in it’s simplicity and structure, but you will need to either be prepared to tinker with PHP and plugins or relinquish a significant level of control over some of the details. I see it as another weapon in my arsenal. It’s good for some tasks, but not all.

Thank You

I also want to thank Jon, Eris, Andreas and the Textpattern community at large for helping me find the plugins and workarounds for some of the things I didn’t like about Textpattern. They were ridiculously helpful, and if it wasn’t for them, I probably would have wasted a lot of time building my own system.

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