Hello my name is Steve Lam and this is my portfolio. I’m a freelance web designer based in Toronto, ON Canada. I love cats, playing music, valid css/xhtml and generally all things music and design related. My aim is to work with indie artists, musicians and small businesses in achieving frenetic designs while adhering to today’s web standards.

For those who are curious, as an open-source advocate my favourite content management system (cms) is Textpattern!

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Textpattern vs Expression Engine

7 October 07

After attempting to reply to a post on the Expression Engine forums, it shortly turned into a long rant that I figure I might as well leave it up here as well:

I have to admit I was almost one of those who wanted to convert from Textpattern to EE. Not because Textpattern wasn’t working the way I wanted but more just to check out something new, with seemingly more features and as sleek looking as EE (although Jon Hicks himself recently released an admin theme eerily and pleasantly akin to EE) . Both systems are very similar in its approach. You get to write your xhtml/css layout templates exactly the way you want, and essentially plug in dynamic content where its needed using EE/TXP tags. Both will output exactly what you input. No need to mess around with pre-built in ‘blocks’ and such ala Joomla/Drupal etc. (although if i had to choose between those two, Drupal would definitely be my choice).

I tried to give wordpress a shot but no thanks. Textpatterns only known security flaws were back in its pre-gamma days. I believe EE has been known for its tight security as well.

While I was testing out the EE waters, I just couldn’t get over how limited the free core version was (which is fair enough seeing as its meant as a trial step towards the paid version). As far as i could tell, the file/image handling was extremely rudimentary. There was no way to output a simple thumbnail gallery without plopping down the $ for the paid version with the gallery module (which in itself seems very limited in features). I’ve seen a few suggestions on using an external gallery script phpthumb but honestly that seemed a little too dirty to accomplish a seemingly simple task.

I still have not been able to successfully get rid of the ‘index.php’ thats present in the default url structure of EE. Textpatterns clean urls have always worked out of the box (minus on a few finnicky shared hosts i’ve used. mainly Netfirms aka possibly the worst, extreme overselling hosting service I’ve come across. Aka where I am right now!)

Of course, over at Textpattern there is no paid support. In spite of this, I lurk both forums quite frequently and to be honest i find things over at TXP much more friendly and helpful. On the EE forums, it seems like unless you pay for a license, the chances of someone helping you out is relatively slim. just take a look at the first 20 or so unanswered posts over at the “community” free EE tech support forum area. Considering the Expression Engine user base is substantially larger than Textpatterns, I find this rather odd! or perhaps the majority have already paid for their EE licenses…I don’t know.

As for TXP to EE converts, there was quite an uproar concerning the state of textpattern written by Drew Mclellan. Honestly, unless you’re a ‘serious’ blogger (meaning you want superfluous features for a blog like ‘openid’), then that post doesn’t apply whatsoever. The never-ending barrage of comments following that post was just pure mob mentality and child-like EE fanboy’ism (although a few responses within the TXP forum from a certain txp developer were definitely out of line as well). Either way I’m embarrassed to say it almost got to me. I use textpattern as a cms, not a blogging platform (though its obviously quite capable of this) and it continues to work quite well.

That being said, Mclellan’s post does have some valid concerns. New versions of Textpattern roll out slowly (version 4.0.5 was released this past august and took a while to appear. Though 4.0.6 is set to release within a few weeks). If you looked at Textpatterns main site you’d probably gather that things weren’t moving along at all. In fact, TXP developers are all quite active on the forums, but seem to ignore the regular public blog posts/news/inside updates you’d expect from any software project. Thats the one qualm I have with the way things are over at Textpattern. But a simple glimpse of the development svn/trac plainly shows you TXP developers checking in with code nearly every single day for both the current version and 4.1 (aka ‘crockery’, where core code is being overhauled for a completely new version) so i’m not sure what people are expecting…do people really want an incessant release schedule (the majority being security fix after security fix) ala Wordpress?

Things that are missing from textpattern right now are a proper e-commerce plugin (although alpha 2 of Textcommerce was released just a few weeks ago), and ‘proper’ deeper navigation levels (although this can be achieved by smartly utilizing sections[generally the first level of navigation] with categories. or by checking out some helpful plugins like zoo_section_and_category_list). Generally I’ve found working with textpattern as a cms to be a complete cinch. I like EE, but so far I’m not seeing any real benefits to upgrading to the commercial version at all.

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(related categories: cms, e-commerce, plugins, textpattern )

Comment

Thanks for your comments and perspective on the EE/Txp comparison. Yes, you are right about the source where I got my impression about Txp folks jumping ship for EE. But also, I’ve been reading “Blog Design Solutions” which raves about EE. This has forced me to take a look at it. I was, however, somewhat surprised at the reactions to my post when I pointed out that the main EE website contains invalid code. The response I was hoping for was “Hey, good eye there ridgerunner. We’ll get on that right away and get it fixed up. We agree that standards compliance is important. Thanks for giving us the heads up!” Instead, the reaction so far has been “Hey, most web sites are non-compliant. Get a life you code nazi.”

However, I’m sure that the actual EE employees are off (it is the weekend) and have not yet read this thread. I’ll be watching to see what their “official” response is to my pointing out that their website is non-compliant. How they react will certainly be a factor in my choice for a new CMS. Once again, thanks for the comments about your experience with EE. (And your website is 100% valid – WooHoo!)

ridgerunner // Oct 7, 06:03 PM · #

TXP is great for simpler sites, but where you need a whole bunch of custom fields for different sections, EE is the way to go. TXP simply can’t handle that.

Terry Evans // Jan 7, 09:08 PM · #

Terry Evans: actually yes it can. Using plugins, you can have unlimited custom fields as well as being able to display certain ones for a particular section.

Steve Lam // Jan 21, 10:31 PM · #

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