Wordpress vs TextPattern
A very stylish, neatly organized, powerful and free web blogging application, this is how we quickly describe TextPattern. This blogging app is open source and can be installed in virtually and hosting environment, it has several nice tools and as mentioned the design and admin area tab navigation as well as the tab organization is exquisite, if you are a very artistic person then you will truly admire how simple and powerful TypePad’s interface is. Wordpress on the other hand is very powerful, highly customizable and expandable but it lacks some of the features found in TypePad, lets take a look at the features found in each blogging tool.
Admin Area Tab Arrangement:
This is a very strong point of TextPattern. Users who love the look of MAC applications will feel at home when they work with the administration graphical user interface provided by TextPattern. There are three major tabs found in the admin area’s top bar navigation, these are: content, presentation, admin and view site (not a highly important tab). The content tab has several sub-menus which allow you to edit your categories, articles, images, files, links and comments. The presentation tab deals with all aspects of your site design and provides easy ways to customize your site’s look without having to deal with HTML, PHP or CSS code. Lastly the admin tab gives you access to your visitor logs, user management, preferences, site diagnostics, plugins and content import from other publishing tools such as Movable Type, Wordpress, b2 and Blogger.
Textile Text Editor:
OK, some users might find this title a little fruity! But it is actually used to describe a very useful and neat tool for editors who want to easily manage and alter the look of their texts without having to memorize complex HTML or CSS tags and values. The name of the tool that we will describe is Textile. This system makes text formatting a breeze, instead of memorizing HTML tags such as <strong> </strong>, <em> </em>, etc. the user will be dealing with words or phrase modifiers which make more sense, for instance:
Phrase Modifier Examples (there are many more of these):
- _emphasis_ - Using underscores before and after a word or phrase will show and emphasis on the words (Italic fonts)
- *strong* - Using the stars before and after a word/phrase will allow you to bold your text
- -deleted text- - Using dashes will show your text with a straight line over it, which is why it is called deleted text.
The first three modifiers are described to show you how they are used by the Textile editor instead of HTML tags, but if you feel better using HTML code you are also able to do so as well.
Working with “Style”
Yet another fruity subtitle eh? - not quite - This particular feature is big, instead of going to your style.css file and manually modifying it you can turn to the “Style” tab and modify the CSS section by section, this doesn’t require any knowledge of CSS or style sheets, you only have to know the hex color values, for instance white is #FFFFFF, black is #000000, these values can be found online but you would have to know them anyway if you are planning on playing with your style sheet, if you don’t like this way of doing things then you are also able to modify the CSS raw file.
In both the CSS style editor and Textile editor, TextPattern has an upper hand when it is compared to Wordpress.
Plugins and Themes:
This is the area where TextPattern falls short in comparison with the highly expandable and flexile Wordpress, however if you are not a very technical user who only wants to focus on blogging and interacting with others rather than managing scripts, functionality and extra applications then TextPattern is definitively for you. TextPattern’s theme library is also limited which is why people who love to have several options as far as themes will obviously prefer Wordpress over TextPattern.