CMS Design Resource

Strengths: TXP is extensible and friendly to markup. My first foray into content management was via this CMS, and I was pleasantly surprised. I still feel strongly about this engine, and I regularly promote it to web designers who are looking to offer clients free and simple content management functionality. I’ve deployed a few txp powered sites across different hosts, and the speed of textpattern still rivals other content management solutions I’ve designed in. Web designers can easily craft a fully functioning site first, and then reverse engineer their markup into textpattern using as little or as much of the cms components as they choose.

Weaknesses: Membership functionality isn’t supported from the core build. There are ways to use plugins to extend the system, but front-end developers may be less comfortable crafting some of the work-arounds.

Strengths: A worth-while CMS for web designers: powerful, elegant, stable, compact, extensible.
Doesn’t get in the way of what you’re trying to do. Supported by knowledgeable developers and a great community.

Weaknesses: Misses some things you’d perhaps expect from a modern CMS: subsections, membership/community support, ability to run multiple sites of one install, backend theming… (some of these features can be enabled to some extent through plugins/patches..)

Strengths: Lightweight (fast), Modular (plugins), Intuitive (XML-style tags), Fun (Community), Free

In response to the only negative review posted so far, yes some plugin developers are no longer active in the community, but there are still amazingly talented people releasing new plugins today, perhaps most noteably, Stef Dawson (who has entered a review here as well). You rock Stef!

Besides that, a great point was made in another article I was reading, that Textpattern plugins very rarely break between core updates, while apparently they usually do break with almost every new release of WordPress or Drupal (others?). So, we already have a great batch of plugins that work perfectly well, and it would be nice if we had even more in the pipeline, but the ones we have aren’t going anywhere. Also, xPattern (a side fork of Txp) is looking like it will bring a much needed overhaul of the admin interface.

Aside from efforts with Txp plugins and xPattern, the latest update to the Textpattern core (4.0.7/4.0.8) was the most significant since I’ve used it, with the ability to parse txp tags within html element attributes, and the new txp:variable tag which has many useful applications. I recently came back to using Txp after a year of letting my site sit and rot, and I was again reminded of what a pleasure it is to use Textpattern and interact with other users in the community forum. It’s hard to believe a program as great as Textpattern is totally free!

Weaknesses: The admin interface could be updated, and I’m looking forward to what xPattern does to help in this area.

Strengths: as a newish user to textpattern I just wanted to add my two cents. Textpattern seems so logically built it’s hard to knock it. People like me need to have a clear understanding of how things work, and have found the small, but helpful community a great asset.

Weaknesses: A small learning curve, but trust me when I say, stick with it and things will click.

Strengths: The best CMS for moving from your already designed static website to an easily updated dynamic web site. The designers CMS as all you need to know is HTML and CSS. No PHP knowledge required.

If Textpattern doesn’t do it, there is probably a plugin.

Examples of wonderful sites can be seen at welovetxp.com.

Weaknesses: User registration isn’t easily done.

Strengths: A lean and clean CMS which has a concise code and structure. (Its codebase is about 1 MB and very easy to install. ) Upgrading is very easy.
It is built in a very logical way, thus helping to built future assured, lasting content. It takes care of webstandards and supports you doing alike (maybe you even don’t notice).
Especially useful for all whose content is based on texts.
With a little knowledge you can publish your texts within an hour.
Learning Textpattern will lead you in the center of basic standards. Building tags are like XML-Tags. You’ll easily see what’s going on in the templates.
A huge strength is a friendly community which will help you with almost everything.

Weaknesses: For some types of content (e.g. if you have thousands of images you need to review very often) more sophisticated tools of organizing them are missing. (But maybe there are plugins I didn’t notice.)
Also shop-plugins aren’t that many (but maybe I only didn’t notice appropriate plugins).

Strengths: fine for really simple sites. any other type of site you’re probably going to put a lot more work into it then you should. at that point you might as well use a more feature-rich cms.

Weaknesses: no real content types. you’re generally stuck with “articles” only.

limited custom fields unless you pay for a plugin or hack core code.

out of the box it only supports two categories per article which makes absolutely no sense. same with only 10 custom fields per article. makes you think how well these were even implemented in the first place to have such ridiculous limitations.

many of the ‘major’ plugin writers have abandoned TXP or are barely a presence in the community anymore.

honestly i believe TXP is a sinking ship right now so if you’re just starting to learn a cms i would go with something a little more established and more modern like wordpress, expression engine, etc etc etc.

Strengths: By far the easiest CMS in which you can get your html exactly like you want it! Great community, very helpful and excellent, easy to find documentation.

Weaknesses: Maybe not the best for community/membership sites.

Strengths: Very fast, impressively flexible. Don’t be fooled by the default theme which is bloglike, Textpattern has grown up and is a complete CMS now.
I only know HTML and CSS, and it’s the only CMS so far which makes me believe I’m a programmer: with simple HTML style tags and attributes I feel empowered to do about anything I want!
The plugin usually add some new tags, Textpattern’s style.
Nearly everything is stocked in the database, even the templates and plugins, it’s easy to relocate your whole site and backup everything.
The developers have a very clever approach in my opinion: want a new feature? they don’t do it themselves with all bells and whistles, they enhance the tools and flexibility needed to do it. Textpattern is essentially clean and unbloated, and the strict policy not to make big changes between minor versions allows for seamless upgrades.
The community is small but very dedicated, we have some great plugin developers there!!!

Weaknesses: The admin side is hard to theme because of the tables used for layout. Also, a bit more of thoses JQuery’s snapness would sure be great!
Textpattern really lacks non-blog themes. Themes productions by the community seems to be very slow these days. A nice and varied selection of themes showing the CMS’s capabilities would ease things a lot for new users.
Textile is great and once you get used to it you couldn’t do without. But, one can’t ask occasional contributors to learn and remember everything. The middle line between WYSIWYG and Textile is simple in my opinion: some buttons to help write Textile. Plugins already exist, but it would be great to have this by default.

Strengths: A supremely capable tool that can help fashion anything from blog to business site and everything in between. The powerful XML-style tags make customisation a breeze — conditional tags are especially useful — and the wealth of plugins take it even further. The user interface doesn’t get in the way of creating sites and it’s all supported by an amazing community.

Weaknesses: Bit of a learning curve for novices but that is easily overcome with the great wiki documentation. Requires a working knowledge of HTML and CSS to get the best from it (which is not really a weakness per se, but means it is less point-click-done — more like design-layout-wow — than other systems).

Strengths: Easy to use, flexible, elegant. Very powerful.

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