What Is It?
A flexible, elegant and easy-to-use content management system. Textpattern
is both free and open
source.
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, but to make these available to the worldwide web – a seemingly
similar environment of documents and destinations – ease of use vanishes
behind sudden requirements for multilingual programming skills, proficiency in
computer-based graphic design, and, ultimately, 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 web application designed to help overcome these and other
hurdles to publishing online, and to simplify the production of
well-structured, standards-compliant web pages.
Text, Textile and XHTML
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. Once you’re ready to publish, copy marked up with Textile is
automatically converted to valid XHTML, 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
(the code with which a web browser renders the article), and a rendered
preview.
Pointing Elsewhere
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.
Multiple Contributors
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.
Working With Style
The Cascading Style Sheets 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 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 FTP
uploading. Style sheets can be generated from scratch or by WYSIWYG
website 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.
Expanding Textpattern
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.
Textpattern Web Hosting
Rich Textpattern hosting features
