• company: partly

Summary

• personal: quite-well
• community: quite-well
• news: quite-well
• shop: partly

company

partly

Details

Evaluation of the Textpattern CMS

Back to EvalCMS

Evaluated version: gamma 1.18a (April 2004)

Size OK

unzipped size [0.5MB], plug-in architecture [yes], coverage of items below [most].

Platform OK

structured PHP [yes], MySQL? [yes]

Install and setup OK

time to go operational [5min], web-based config [all], multiple sites in one CMS instance [yes]

Plain text edit OK

wiki-like input [no], textile [yes] (textile native, same author ;-)

WYSIWYG editing KO

wysiwyg [no], configurable [n/a] -- maybe could hack txp core.

Generated HTML OK

valid XHTML [yes] (partly depends on template used).

Templating OK

user control [variable-template], website section differentiation [yes], snippet templates [yes].

Domain-specific applications OK

mechanism for app inclusion [both].

User management OK

users and roles [roles], user groups with privileges [no].

Content structuring OK

hierarchical content [multilevel], hierarchical URL [complex-rewrite], hierarchical presentation [blog/tweaks].

Localization OK

L10N? and I18N? issues separate in implementation [yes].

Metadata OK

can set metadata [page], metadata supported [keywords] -- but see grumbles.

URL features OK

link contents [id/titles] (can choose in setup), search-engine friendly URLs? [tweaks] -- via .htaccess content type forcing.

Archiving KO

supports archiving (rather than deleting) old content [no], content is versioned [no].

Statistics so-so

usage stats gathered [yes], can create polls [no].

Documentation so-so

templating manual [rough], programming manual [rough].

Praises:

• installation -- web wizard, up and running in 3 minutes
• content structuring -- easy to understand, hierarchical categories, menu definition based on them: it's a snap! where is the catch? read the grumbles...
• localisation -- easy, just edit lang file; however...
• templating -- page/section templates defined within the CMS itself => easy to custom-develop; templates can include PHP code => easy to wrap current apps
• plug-ins easy to develop and plug in ;-)

Grumbles:

• localisation -- charsets seems conflicting: pages generated use UTF-8, but UTF-based lang file displays rubbish
• templates -- difficult to export/share; would benefit from user params on forms, and txp: tags in stylesheet def.
• content structuring -- hierarchical categories, but these can't be used to hierarchically structure the content presentation... so one must hack with sections, via name conventions to express hierarchy...
• WYSIWYG editing -- I have not tried to put htmlarea as the article editor, as it would mean changing txp core.
• applications -- very few plug-ins (at the time of writing) for common things (polls, mailing, calendars, events)