I admittedly have only had extensive experience with two content management systems (CMS’s): WordPress and Textpattern. I have had other less-involved experience (really just testing) with CMS’s like Drupal and Blogger but I’m hardly an expert with these.
Appropriately I’m writing tell you not about the CMS’s that I don’t have much experience with but about those with which I’ve had some time to get very familiar, Textpattern (TXP) and WordPress (WP).
As I was writing this article I came to the realization that I’m probably going to get lots of WP experts and TXP hackers that will correct me on uber-technical details of code snippets and implementation. I expect and welcome this but it bears mentioning that I’m more advanced in my knowledge of WP (and to a lesser extent, TXP) than the ‘average’ user so if I get confused by this stuff then a new(er) user will most certainly be stumped. Thus, I stand by my original assertion that TXP is easier to learn and more robust than WP; especially for a new user.
I’m not here to bash WP. It’s a great blogging application and I’ve had more experience with it than TXP. I’ve seen some amazing things done with WP and I loved it so much that I even released a theme built on it (I may yet port unsleepable to TXP). It was my entry point to self-hosted blogging and overall, the community is patient, knowledgeable and very self-giving.
Template tags
Now that I’ve had a chance to learn TXP I have to say that it’s MUCH easier to use and MUCH more flexible than WP. TXP and WP are both built using PHP and MySQL. But the major difference between WP and TXP is that TXP uses template tags to manipulate the PHP and WP uses (somewhat) raw PHP. The raw PHP isn’t hard to use per se, but I have to admit that it took me a lot longer to figure out and use it than it did for me to learn the TXP template tags.
Site architecture
The way TXP breaks down a site also feels more natural to me. It breaks it down into sections. Each section then uses a certain page template. Then each page template is build using different forms. Forms can be thought of a code snippets. It’s hard to describe to a non-TXP user, but once you get in there and use the interface you’ll realize that it’s much more flexible than WP. Let me put it this way, while TXP feels more natural to me it’s not necessarily as simple as WP. WP was built to be a blogging engine, TXP was built to manage any kind of site you can imagine, including blogs.
Always remember than simplicity is inversely related to flexibility.
No nonsense software
One of the things that always bugged me about WordPress was the main admin page. It assumes that I want a bunch of information that I really don’t care about. I don’t care how many comments my blog has, and I especially don’t care what the WP developers were writing about on their blogs. In fact, that always seemed to me to be a cheap trick just to get more people reading the dev’s blogs by foisting their feeds on every WP user on the planet.
By contrast when you go to the TXP main admin page it assumes only one thing: that you want to write something.
Conclusion
So, apart from simple template tags, a more flexible site architecture, and the fact that TXP doesn’t push goofy stuff in your face, it’s not too different from WP. Both are very fast CMS’s (if WP is using the WP-cache plugin), both are reasonably good at blocking comment spam (though I find TXP to be better at it) and both are open source software with huge, helpful communities behind them.
WordPress is a great blogging application but Textpattern is the way Content Management is supposed to be.
