Adam has asked that I post this review of Textpattern as there seem to be a lack of them floating the net. So here is what I sent him as my opinion when he asked what I thought:

I think it is a good program. Dean designed with not just weblogs in mind, so it’s not geared solely toward bloggers. The structure is different and takes some figuring out, but I really like it. That it’s coded in php makes it fabulous…no rebuilds.

The tags are similar, but I think there is still a ways to go for it to be as flexible as MT currently is. I have to say…once you learn the tags and the template system, it’s way easier to develop a template.

As far as multiple blogs go, it’s easier…it’s all in one place. Instead of blogs they are called sections. Each section is customizable, but they all share the inventory of images and articles and categories. So it’s easier to “cross post”, and easier to maintain since everything is in the same location. It also makes it easier to customize all sections to match, say if you maintain separate “sections” for different components of your blog. And the image inventory?

You upload images to a central inventory. These images can then be used in articles, templates or straight HTML. They don’t automatically jump to the post like in MT, but you can easily get to them and see what all you’ve downloaded. And you have to upload thumbnails separately, as of yet, there are no thumbnail creation capabilites, but I’m sure that will come soon. And it has built in photo album capabilities so that is always a plus for bloggers.

With MT, each “section” is it’s own blog and they are pretty independent of each other, unless you use plugins to grab content from the other blogs. And once you download an image, it’s lost forever in your directories to be unreachable again via MT without explicitly knowing where you put it.

Textpattern still has a ways to go…but Dean is constantly working on it and his interaction with users in the support forums shows that he is listening and really trying to meet the needs of those users. It has a lot of potential for moving up the ranks to really compete with MT. More so I think than WordPress which is not nearly as complex a program as MT or Textpattern.

I hope this helps shed some light on Dean Allen’s new little application that is making headway into the web publishing world.

Ha! I’ve done something that I hope is right. Those of you who know me already know I’m a programmer. I code in Visual Basic and I use PHP for web development. So I can pretty much figure out some things. Well, I’m not sure I mentioned this before, but the fabulous plugin MTCloseComments has one minor glitch. It closes comments on all blogs in that installation. Not just the blog in which you placed the plugin tag. So with my programmer mind on go, I delved into the code for the plugin, and figured out (I think) how to get the plugin to only close comments for that blog. Although I don’t know a thing about Perl, it appears to be working. I’ve notified the creator of the plugin along with the person in charge at the MT Plugin Directory, letting them know I made this change. Hopefully they will want a copy of my file, look it over and say I didn’t mess anything up.

I’ve made a minor change here. Comments are now closed on entries that are more than 30 days old. This should help spamming. If you feel you need to make a comment on an entry that is closed, please send me an email. Also, I will be slowly making the change to all my entries so that they are use the new text filter Markdown. I really like this filter and I think it will make things easier as far as text entry. In conjunction, I’ve also installed SmartyPants. So my apostrophes and quotes are curly, as is the new thing here in blogland.

Update: Apparently it isn’t working in this blog. Don’t know why but I’ve created a bug for it. Not sure if it’s because I’m using MTMacro for my smilies or what.

Update again: Haha! I forgot that my template were explicitly setting my filter to none and using the format_breaks plugin. I changed it on the front page to see what happens. By default all my entries were set to convert breaks anyway, so it shouldn’t mess things up too much while I switch over.

I installed Textpattern (TXP) to check it out and I must say, it is one nice little software. I love that changes are instantaneous. I love the template system. I love the interface. I love that it is in php…making it more feasible for me to develop a plugin to do what I want.

There are still some things it lacks that I don’t want to give up from MT, but overall Dean’s done a great job. And it keeps getting better. He is constantly working on it. I see it becoming a popular app. It is also designed not just for weblogs, but for many types of content management.

There is even an import script for MT. It is still buggy, but overall it is pretty good. I was able to import all of my entries from my knitting blog. I just may switch over and leave everything there, but I’m not sure yet. With Movable Type 3.0 coming out pretty soon, I may just decide to wait…but gosh, I want to use TXP for something! It’s a great application.

Like pMachine blocks, TXP uses forms. Create a form for each piece in your sidebar, then in the main page template include that piece. The tags are pretty easy to figure out, but documentation is still somewhat limited. Don’t fret…the user forums are fabulous and you will usually get a response within a few hours.

If you’re tired of the rebuilds and the bulkyness of MT, but WordPress just doesn’t do it for you…check out TXP. You might just end up switching over.