My first impression of Textpattern has been quite a good one. For one thing, it was really easy to install, and was all graphical, which definitely was a plus (uncommenting lines in cryptic config files isn’t nearly as fun!). But the biggest thing for me, seriously monumental, was the way in which Textpattern handles templates/themes. More or less, you code the HTML skeleton, sans content, with no Textpattern standards to conform to, and then you merely insert special commands, almost like server-side includes where the various bits of blog-goodness should go. For instance, all the blog posts have a command (txp:article form=”default” limit=”15″ listform=”default”, which spits out a max of 15 articles per page, and compared to other CMS’ templating formats is elegant), and I just inserted that into a Div, and voila, a blog! MovableType is similar to this, but more complex, and don’t even get me started about WordPress. You see, WordPress has a templating language (!) written in PHP, which is hardly easy to learn (let alone use).

As you may notice the blog part of this site is directly tied into the rest, as far as design goes. To sum it up, in Textpattern it took all of 2-3 minutes to copy in the HTML/CSS from the main page and adapt it to the blog by inserting those special commands I talked about. It would have taken me–you know what, I was gonna say 2-3 hours to do in WordPress, and then I thought 2-3 days, but you know what? Even for a simple design like this, I doubt I could even do that in WordPress. And you know what’s crazy? I had used TextPattern for all of 10, maybe 15 minutes before setting up this template, and yet I’ve been using WordPress for months and it’s far more cumbersome. But in WordPress’ defense, I would definitely say that there are developers who use WordPress, and then there are the end-users.

Aside from templates and the like, there aren’t any huge distinctions between WP and Textpattern. From an administrative perspective, I think Textpattern has a much cleaner interface, and WP’s is just too busy. But on the other hand, I do kind of like WP’s admin design a tad more. Another big thing to note is the actual blog entry form, you know where you type in your article. What about it? Well, Textpattern is really lacking here. WP has a full-blown WYSIWYG editor, with ‘Bold’ / ‘Italic’ buttons, things of that nature–rich text editing. Textpattern? Um…no. That’s a bummer. Textpattern does support Textile, which is some sort of mark-up, but that’s just one more thing to learn, and I prefer nice little buttons anyway.

So, who wins this vicious, bloody war of the CMSs? Oh man, I don’t know–download both and see which one you prefer! That’s the beauty of free software. Woohoo @ FLOSS!