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Textpattern All Grown Up

Tuesday November 22, 2005 / 11 Comments

I’ve been using Textpattern for some time now, but until the last couple of releases, I always had a few minor complaints. They weren’t enough to prevent me from using it, but they always lingered. Well, I fixed one with my first patch and numerous others have been doing their part as well. All of my wildest dreams have come true.

The Comment Form

This was the area where I felt Textpattern was the weakest. It made numerous assumptions that could not be overridden without hacking the source. However, when you hack the source, your changes get lost at upgrade time, so that is no longer an option for me.

Labels & ID’s

The comment form now supports ID’s and labels by default. Score one for accessibility and standards. (This was my little contribution.)

Tabindexes & Buttons

I don’t know if it’s a happy accident, or intentional, but the comment form now works when you use an HTML preview and submit buttons rather than the Textpattern equivalents.

By using the HTML buttons, it’s easy to change the form to allow commenting without previews. All you do is add an HTML submit button to the form instead of the Textpattern version of the submit button. I understand that the forced preview is one of the central spam prevention tools, but I like to live dangerously.

Lastly, while the tabindexes still default to a non-intuitive order, by simply moving the message area to be the first field and adding tabindexes to the HTML buttons, you’ve got a comment form with propper tabindexes. That’s two niggles down.

Comment Previews

Comment previewing was an area that I felt was abstracted a bit too much and didn’t provide enough control. The result, while usable, wasn’t as elegant as I would like. Textpattern would just automatically display the comment form and preview at the top of hte page above your article.

Enter customized comment previews. Now you now have the ability to place the comment preview anywhere you like. It’s flexibile enough to give you control if you want it but gracefully reverts to the original behavior if you couldn’t care less.

Custom Error Pages

As if all of that wasn’t enough, Textpattern now has built in custom error pages. Now you can design and implement a default error page, and easily define custom error pages for specific errrors such as 404 or 500 errors, and it’s all baked right in.

Speed and Quality of Releases

Not only does it seem like even minor point releases are huge and high quality, but they are happening almost too fast to keep up with. As soon as I think it can’t get much better, they roll out a wonderful set of improvements and enhancements that make Textpattern that much better.

Summary

Textpattern has always been one of the more elegant solutions, if not the most elegant, but it was lacking the level of control in some areas. The rest of the package was good enough to look the other way in those instances, but with the recent upgrades, that’s no longer necessary. The only weakness now is in the documentation of all of these wonderful features, but I anticipate that is coming soon. Either way, if you haven’t given Textpattern a try yet, now may be the time.

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Amen. TXP has quickly grown up and a pleasure to use.

Eddie

I agree. I’ve been using Textpattern since RC1, which isn’t as long as some, but long enough to know that it’s coming into its own as a “contender.” What drew me to it initially was the ease of templating, as opposed to the multiple PHP includes necessary for WordPress. I’m not saying one is better than the other, as Textpattern requires learning additional syntax. But, for me, it’s TXP (hey, that rhymes).

Nathan Smith

Ok you’ve convinced me. I’ll install Textpattern when I get home from work :P

Jack

Yes, i agree. Textpattern is great software, and a great one to work on. I’ve used the other CMS software (Mambo, Drupal, Wordpress, MT) before and Textpattern is the only one that offers the simpliest and easiest to use yet (my opinion based on my experience). And the only one that doesn’t try to offer everything in one package (Mambo is by far the most complex).

Further, I’ve seen websites use Textpattern as a blog software, as a CMS for a typical website, and many others using it as a bulletin board. :)

In fact, I’m working on a service that works like Wordpress.com or Typepad.com, but instead uses Textpattern. I’ll be putting it up soon on my website at, http://www.txblogr.com. I am hoping that with this, a lot of more people can try Textpattern before they totally switch.

Mark John

Nice article Garrett.

Marko Mihelcic

I agree, it’s been a worth while venture using TXP! I’ve been using it since Dean made it available a couple of years ago. Its momentum has never wavered, and its progress has only been beneficial to those who use it and love it.

The community, creator, and contributors are all top notch fellows both professionally and personally (derived from the forums). The secret behind the success in my opinion is the passion to build a superior tool in a community setting.

Cody Lindley

I’m most impressed about the speed of the development, it was but a few months ago that there was only basic error pages, now they’re custom.

If only I had time to play with it more often.

matt

I love Textpattern, but the lack of documentation is keeping me away from doing the complete switch from Wordpress.

I mean, I know a great deal about programming and PHP, but I don’t like to study the code to get how I can take the most out of an app.

So, once TXP’s documentation will be better, I think I’ll move… :)

Michele

I was sold before, now I’m thoroughly impressed. Thanks for the great article Garrett!

Gordo

I found their forum to be really useful when I started using TXP + those plugins made my life really easy. I have just started to convert all of my projects from other cms to txp.

Vesa Virlander

I’m just learning Textpattern, but I’ve already converted two websites to it. I love it! Looking back on all the sites I’ve set up in WordPress, I’m regretting not discovering Txp sooner.

I still don’t get the error page thing, without using a static CSS file, that error_default page is a pain to maintain (since the CSS won’t be served dynamically to the error page). I must be missing something, I am sure.

Justin P

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