This time, I remembered Textpattern while exploring options for The Agenda’s website. I’d examined the possibility of using WordPress for this, but found the reasons to use it as a CMS much less convincing than the reasons not to. I could set up The Agenda’s site with WordPress, but I wouldn’t enjoy it. My users would be more comfortable with its interface than they are with Drupal’s, but extending what’s fundamentally a single-blog tool into a newspaper website with multiple site sections and the individual editor/contributor blogs the Editor-in-Chief insists on having wouldn’t be fun at all.

Searching for alternatives, I looked up Textpattern again, did some reading before installing it on a test site, and was much more impressed this time. RTFMing is all but mandatory with Textpattern, it seems, and as annoying as that may be for the more arrogant among some of us, I’ve found it has an upside: You can’t just throw together a website without some understanding of how the software works, so you’re less likely (if only slightly) to set something up in a way you’ll regret later.

I’ve seen it suggested that Textpattern has a higher learning curve than WordPress. I think this depends on what you’re learning. If you’re just writing a simple blog based on a predesigned theme, that’s definitely true. Textpattern, with no built-in theming support, makes it more difficult to change your site’s appearance than WordPress, which lets you install a theme by simply unzipping a file into your /themes/ directory and clicking once or twice in the admin panel. But designing a theme from scratch, particularly one which is more than a simple blog, with a list of articles down the middle and some links on the side, is much simpler in Textpattern.

One significant weakness of Textpattern is its documentation. The Textbook is not particularly thorough, and not always clear There is a lot of useful information available about Textpattern, but much of it is scattered across the Internet, in individual users’ (and developers’) blog posts. I hope to collect a number of these in an upcoming post.

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Since Daydream Lab is, at the moment, a testing ground for Textpattern website development, I’ll be posting notes about what I learn in the process of building (and, quite possibly, rebuilding) the Lab.

Field Reports:

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