Textpattern
Textpattern was born before WordPress
nearly 2 years. Both projects are presented the first full version in 2003, but
Textpattern was available already in several developed versions since 2003. Now
it is at 4.4.1 version and the latest version was launched in June 2011.
Although it is often considered as a dedicated blog tool (and it is used that
way by many people), you’d better think about it as a content management system
focused on text for peope who want to think much about their website content
than how it is combined.
Textpattern
is the great choice for anyone whose work related to text but they don’t want
to design manually.
Textpattern includes all support tools that
you will wait in a blogging platform composed of link management, design based
on template and comment system. However, it ignores trackback and pingback
functions which can prevent those that link and SEO is the first and best priority
for their marketing activities.
So what makes Textpattern stand out from
competitors? It is the integrated Textile language, simplifying context design
without disrupting your thoughts. It does this by using popular characters such
as *, # and _ instead of HTML. If you want to ilalicize some words in the
sentence, you just need to surround them by underscores. Textpattern will
recognize them as the alternative and swap the first underscore for <i>
and the second one for </i> whenever the page is shown. If you want to
create a bulleted list, put an asterisk before each item in the list and use
two or more asterisks to identify any lower rank in that list.
Working this way is faster than remembering
to open your list with <ol> and close it with </
ol> and surround each element in it by using <li>
and </li>. The result is that you have to spend much time to think about
what you are writing and how it looks like in the screen, and there’s less time
left to consider about which tag you need to do these special types.
They are simple examples, but Textile goes
further by simplifying the task embedding photos by using exclamation and
quotation marks. Following marks will embed the title Shopper and use
“Computer Shopper Logo” for its tag:
!computershopper.jpg (Computer Shopper
Logo)!
It sounds simple but if you dig deeper, you
will find the amazing level of replacement the code. For example, with tablets,
the following command creates a table of 3 columns and 4 row with the first row
is designed as a header cell system:
|_. Month |_. Average rainfall
|_. Average daily sunshine |
| June | 2.5mm | 8 hours |
| July | 2mm | 8.5 hours |
| August | 0.75mm | 9.25 hours |
Please notice that we don’t need to specify
the start and end point of tables, rows or any columns. We don’t need to
distinguish between <th> and <td> to design title separately with
our data as well.
Textpattern is ideal for anyone who needs
to think seriously. Being easy to use and multiple user function make it become
the great choice for multiple user blogs and especially for news websites.
Sources are often erratic in those organizations, which is why Textile platform
of Textpattern is so attractive for a future blogger.
Relevance:
Websites full of text and for anyone who need time to write but don’t want to
think too much about the format.
Download
from http://textpattern.org
Requirement:
web server running PHP 4.3 or more, and MySQL 3.23 or more
Sample websites: www.mosman.nsw.gov.au, www.louiscarrer, www.wilshireone.com
