Evaluation of the Textpattern CMS
Back to EvalCMS
Summary
- personal: quite-well
- community: quite-well
- news: quite-well
- shop: partly
- company: partly
Details
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)