TextPattern : Quality not hype

I haven't had much time to post for the last fortnight. But there has been lots I wanted to talk about. One reason I've been time poor is that we've been doing some research into Content Management Tools to cover the needs of some upcoming projects. In the end we installed and tested two systems; Drupal and TextPattern. This short list was partly derived by running available CMS based sites through the W3C validator. TextPattern was the only CMS that validated cleanly and Drupal was fairly close. But in the end some popular choices from our shortlist quickly disappeared as they had so many validation errors.

The inclusion of TextPattern was a big surprise. We currently have a casual working for us who is a real TextPattern fan. I kept saying ; but you wouldn't be able to do x in TextPattern and almost everytime the answer was yes. In fact almost anything you would want to do with Drupal could be done with TextPattern. Though in every example there was one major difference between the two : TextPattern was easier. Everything in Drupal requires three semi-obscure steps to set it up. While everything in TextPattern required one click and a save.

There were things we really needed that weren't available for TextPattern (ie. LDAP validation) so in the end we decided on Drupal. But if you are looking for a CMS and your needs aren't too complicated then I suspect you won't go to far wrong using TextPattern.