Textpattern is a flexible and elegant content management system for powering all kinds of websites, including personal journals (weblogs) and commercial sites.
When it comes to publishing on the internet, beginners and experts alike are met with a bothersome paradox: word processors and graphics applications allow anyone to do a pretty good job of managing text and images on a personal computer, however the same skills do not translate to creating content on the world-wide web. Up till now, creating web content requires knowledge of several standards, intricacies of competing browsers, programming skills, computer-based graphic design, and it helps to have the patience of a saint. Those who soldier on anyway may find themselves further held back by the web’s purported inflexibility with written language, with its reluctance to cope with all but the plainest of text, or by the unpredictable results brought about by using ‘WYSIWYG’ web editors.
Textpattern is a content management system (CMS) designed to help overcome these hurdles and to simplify the production of well-structured, standards-compliant web pages. It is suitable for small and medium sized sites and incorporates many features found in other popular weblog software packages without forcing the user into a date-based organizational model. In Textpattern, the content is organized by type.
For other features, read on.
Sites published with Textpattern can employ unlimited registered contributors, each of whom may be assigned privileges by the publisher of the site. Five levels of privileges (publisher, managing editor, copy editor, writer and designer) are provided, and each reflects different access to article creation, approval, editing and deletion, and to image uploads, page design and CSS, and of course adding more contributors.
Built into Textpattern is //Textile//, a simple syntax for nudging plain text into structurally sound and stylistically rich web content.
Ordinarily fussy text amendments such as headers, hyperlinks, image tags and tables are created with one or two simple markers. Compared to navigating the tag soup of markup, writing and revising with Textile is much more intuitive, being closer to working with ordinary text. Content marked up with Textile is automatically converted to valid Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) – the code with which a web browser renders the article – and because Textpattern stores both versions of each article, revising and updating is a snap.
When composing or readying articles for publication in Textpattern, you can switch between three views of the article: plain text, XHTML, and a rendered preview.
The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) standard is a slim, powerful language that allows you to centralize site-wide control of content presentation. Everything from fonts and colours to sizes and positions can be governed through CSS.
Ordinarily CSS data appears in the head section of an Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) document, or is stored in a text file linked to the document. Modern browsers parse this data in advance of displaying a page, and then cache the data for use on subsequent pages or site visits. As such, CSS can greatly reduce the download size of web pages: just one of many improvements CSS formatting offers over older web design methods. Textpattern offers two modes of maintaining style sheets for your pages.
In Manual CSS mode, you can create (or paste in) any style sheet information you like, right in the Textpattern interface. This allows for quick editing of styles without the clumsy bother of File Transfer Protocol (FTP) uploading. Style sheets can be generated from scratch or by WYSIWYG Web site editors, and are found all over the web.
In Automatic CSS mode, style sheet editing is taken to a sophisticated new level, using an editing interface and organizational method intended to make CSS parameters more readable and logical. Any existing style sheet can be ‘poured’ into the editing interface and modified indefinitely.
Maintaining and displaying lists of links to other sites, or to other areas within your own site, is central to Textpattern. Unlimited links in unlimited categories can be stored and output wherever you like. Adding new links is easy through the Textpattern editor, or easier still by way of a Javascript bookmarklet, which presents a popup input to you wherever you are on the web. Benefits of managing links can be found here.
Installing and managing plugins that extend Textpattern's abilities is straightforward. Once installed, plugins can be turned on and off from within the Textpattern interface, where detailed help and access to parameters used by plugins is also available. For detailed instructions on installing and the basic operation of plugins view the Adding Plugins To Textpattern guide.