mamaLove

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.