Textpattern!

Oct 11, 2005 · 3 minute read

In something of a shock I’ve just ported the site (well some of it so far) to Textpattern. I’d alluded that I was looking to do something similar (I mentioned a crazy Ruby fueled idea, but strayed away after having a run in with fastcgi) a little time ago but have finally gotten around to it.

The reasons where many fold, but mainly came down to wanting to do other things that write content management applications. I know I can do it, and it’s certainly not a solved problem, but it’s not as much a part of my job any more – every few months I was wanting to go back and rewrite something fundamental (or everything) and it was getting in the way of me doing other, hopefully more interesting and useful things – like Newcastle New Media , Fluid Flash or playing with whatever buzz word is in this week (definately Web 2.0).

So after what was quite a brief look around I settled on Textpattern mainly for it’s positioning. It is a blogging ap, but has lots of other features that allow content management of other elements – hopefully useful for side projects and the like. It’s PHP and MySQL so I can rip it to pieces if I want. It’s mature, stable, feature rich and does, with plugins, everything I probably need – the big question will be if it does them in a way I like, so far it’s thumbs up. Oh and John Hick’s has written a number of really good articles on textpattern, including a migration piece which gave me some pointers.

I’ve ported recent posts and comments, I’ll move the rest on an as time permits basis but, after some mod\_rewriting mad skills I’ve kept the old site fully functional (no link rot – yeah).

All in all it probably took me 4 hours, in a couple of sessions, to get all the styles into textpattern, set up a few plug-ins (del.icio.us links, live previews – whoo), port the latest content and move from my development box to here. A pretty good testament to the ease of use of textpattern. If I had not had the original design or content I would have been up and running in minutes – the installation process is smooth as a new cuddly toy.

Their are a couple of changes that hopefully only the anal will even see. I’ll try and resurect some of them, probably in a more satisfying manner that before.

For the moment I’ll keep the existing rss feed up to date but only for a little while, the new textpattern feeds can be accessed from the navigation menu, and now include an atom feed as well (basically because I can).

In conclusion, anyone looking to move, or start, a blog style site with other ambitions then textpattern could be what your looking for – although some PHP skills wouldn’t go a miss.

Anyway, here’s to a more organised life. Anything fundamentally wrong let me know!