William Computer Blog

Textpattern

Quoting from the website of textpattern — “A flexible, elegant, easy-to-use content management system for all kinds of websites, even weblogs.”. It is created by Dean Allen.

I’ve been waiting for this CMS to be released. I don’t know when textpattern was first available for download. I did subscribe to the notification mailing list but I didn’t receive any e-mail notifying me that textpattern was available. I only realised it when I came across someone’s blogs today.

Textpattern has been installed on a temporary website for me to experiment and explore the features of this new CMS.

The first feature that makes textpattern is different than other blogging tool is textile. Textile is built-into the CMS. Textile is a humane Web text editor and it is useful for writers who doesn’t really understand HTML.

Textile will automatically translate plain ASCII characters into correct HTML entities — it works the same like smartypants plugin for movable type only you don’t need additional hack on textpattern. When you create an entry in textpattern you no longer need to manually write HTML tags if you need to insert tags like img, header, unordered list, ordered list.

h1. Header goes here
h2. Header goes here
h3. Header goes here

textile will automatically turn it into:

<h1>Header 1</h1>
<h2>Header 2</h2>
<h3>Header 3</h3>

When creating a numeric list (ordered list) all you have to do is type:

# A First Item
# A second Item
# A third item
# A fourth item

and it will turn the above into a correct HTML code:

<ol>
<li>A first item</li>
<li>A second item</li>
<li>A third item</li>
<li>A fourth item</li>
</ol>

There are many more features to textile, you can go to the textile web for more information about it. I should continue writing about textpattern now.

One other great feature of textpattern that is not available on other CMS I know is the three views option when composing an entry. Textpattern allows you to view your entries like WYSIWYG editor. You can view the entry, the HTML and the preview of that entry.

All HTML codes created by textpattern is standard compliant, which is great. Dean Allen the creator of textpattern is the site designer of the webstandards project.

A default layout is included with textpattern but I think it’s very simple and you need to edit the layout in order to make it look better. The default layout is valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional with CSS to control the presentation and layout of the site.

Installation is very easy, you are required to have a PHP installed on your webserver and a MySQL database. It only took me a few minutes to install it. You can configure your weblog via the control panel and it’s very easy. It is very user-friendly.

Supports are available on textpattern forum. Btw, please contact me if you’d like to test textpattern but you are too lazy to download and install it on your webserver or you don’t have the requirement to install it on your webserver. I will create you a username and password to log into my textpattern installation for you to demo it.

• February 26, 2004