Textpattern Exploration

by Destry Wion  ::  published 7 December 04    

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time trying to get my head around an open-source content publishing system called Textpattern.

On the surface, it seems quite sleek and powerful, but it does have a different semantic model than what most information designers would expect, which means a rather steep learning curve in the beginning. There is no centralized user documentation, such as a manual, wiki, etc.; the situation at the moment is user support forum and a lot of distributed “how-to� information on user Weblogs. There is an effort to consolidate these distributed Textpattern resources, and the documentation efforts of the individual authors are quite noble, but the real problem, in my humble opinion, is the lack of coordination with the documentation effort.

However, I’m finding that I’m slowly starting to understand a few things about Textpattern, and the more I learn, the more I like what I discover. Content components can be managed at quite a fine scale, which at this point is a big step beyond most “blogâ€? systems, and therefore makes this a bit more than just a Weblog system; it’s more like a real content management system, and the fact that it’s free, open-source is even better. The producer of Textpattern, Dean Allen (who is also the developer of Textile…the immensely popular HTML generator that is used in many other content publishing systems, including WordPress) is really to be commended for his efforts with this product. (The developers of all content publishing systems, no matter, are to be commended; developing these things is no small endeavor.)

Textpattern is pretty impressive, and so I’m thinking about converting Wion Design to be fully managed by it. Perhaps I’ll even start some Textpattern documentation of my own, since there seems to be a real need for some.

You’ll probably be seeing more from me about Textpattern.

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