Textpattern and its future

August 7, 2007 in plugins, wordpress
Tags: cms, textpattern, themes

I am using Textpattern since Dean Allen published the first version of the program. Mainly as a blog, but for some business-related websites, its CMS-qualities are very usefull. However, I cannot clearly see where all this is going to. I have asked a similar question some time ago, but perhaps now things got clearer.

Blog?

TXP is great for blogs. One could argue that there are systems that deal better with blogs, especially WordPress is a great system if you do not want to fiddle around with themes, sections and so on and as far as I know, it will soon have genuine tagging-support, a feature that is only achievable with plugins now. (As in TXP.) So could we see TXP’s future as a blogging-tool together with many, many others? I don’t think, it will. All major web2.0-sites (I hate this term, yet everyone knows what I am talking about) do not include TXP in their blog-listings. Take flickr as an example: They list a lot of plattforms to blog to, TXP, however, is not there. The same with a lot of other web2.0-sites.

CMS for Professionals?

Is TXP the right choice when it comes to professional websites that do not deal with blog-like site-structures? I don’t know, but I would say no (although I use it a lot for such websites). On the one hand, TXP is too much focused on blog-like websites, on the other hand, it has the power to easily manage a small and also medium-sized website with ease as long as there are not too many subpages. Here also plug-ins can help, but if you look at TXP’s plugin-development, you can name a dozen active developers and about three times the amount of people more, who switched away from TXP.

Plugins

I had a look into WP and when returning back to TXP (I did it, because nothing beats the flexibility of the section-system), everything got quiet. Too quiet, to be honest. I am just an average user and somehow I have a strange feeling when looking at release dates and seeing that the last TXP-release was half a year ago. Many problems that are quite often mentioned in the forum are either ignored or of no urgency, however these problems include tagging and comment-spam (with which I have to deal with in the last weeks, too).

If you look at the plugins and especially their availability, you have most likely the following situation: One guy made a good plugin. If you visit his website, however, the bottom-line of this person’s blog already says “published with wordpress” and the plugin can be found somewhere in the archives with a new remark telling you that the future development of this plugin has been stopped.

Themes

One of the darkest chapters of TXP is the availability of themes. No matter whether themes are important or not – people use them as a basis or as an inspiration for their own themes. Also, newbie-users would profit much more if they could get an idea of the whole presentational-structure of TXP by examples. I invested much time in TXP and learned the whole thing by myself, but if I learned something from outside, it was by installing (well, if you can call this procedure installing) other’s themes.

Documentation

As long as I have used TXP in its basic english version, documentation, especially the question marks inside TXP were no problem at all. Now TXP can be used in German language (and many others), yet documentation sucks. Even some links from the textpattern.com site to wikis and so on are broken! This makes dealing with TXP really difficult for people who just started with it. Even for me, when looking for specific semantics, it is digging through one of the worst written documentations, therefore, the forum gives me much faster answers! (Also, the translation of the diagnostics into various languages, was a bad idea: The contents of the “Results” in the diagnostics tab should be in one language available only, this makes helping much more easy!)

And, something else: I think the splitting into various domains makes the whole thing really annoying. Keep it simple, somebody once said, and for me help.textpattern.com, wiki.textpattern.com etc. is simply easier to remember than various domains.

Development and Psychology

When I motivated people to start blogging (or to use websites and not sending me thousands of photos by e-mail… whatever), they rejected TXP simply because of its release date. WP is updated every month or at least every two months – was their argument. I myself install WP time to time, because I am really curious on what these guys added to their CMS. So how do TXP-developers deal with this and what are the plans for the future of TXP? Paid service? Blogging-Plattform? CMS for professional websites? Hum. Answers greatly appreciated.