Textpattern... what's the general feel about it?

Question

We are about to start a new project, and an outsourced developer has come in and insists that Textpattern is the way forward... personally I don't mind. I can develop in almost any PHP environment... but the aim of the game is that it does well with SEO.

The question is, is Textpattern any good? Wordpress, Drupal etc are all very usable, with varying degrees on tidiness on the code, but they all work. Why would textpattern be any better than Wordpress for example? I like the community, I like the API, I like the plugins... why would you want to replace WP?

Thanks guys.

Answer 1

They're both pretty much the same as far as I know.

WP has more plugins, it's easier to install themes for it and it's more popular. It's got a worse security record though.

Textpattern is also robust, customisable and has decent plugins (though not as much as WP). It doesn't have the easy drag/drop theme installation as does WP (last time I checked anyway) but has a better security record in general. I personally find the whole look a little more tasteful than WP which seems to try too hard but that's just a personal opinion.

Drupal is heavier, more customisable and a different beast from WP and textpattern. Your needs would be different if you wanted that.

All of them do decent SEO by default as far as I know. Alteast I know that WP and Drupal do it well. TP too from what I remember.

You should just ask the outsourced developer for concrete reasons why to use TP instead of WP. Engineering reasons, tradeoffs, pros, cons, statistics, numbers. Make it clear to him that you're not going to let the project hinge on his personal preferences.

Answer 2

I think they are both very capable systems, and if you already know one of the systems over the other I'd go with the one you know...

There are some differences though, these pages give quite a nice summary of the pros and cons between the two:

http://txpmag.com/article/textpattern-versus-wordpress

http://www.robspangler.com/blog/wordpress-vs-textpattern