ExpressionEngine vs TextPattern
Some years back, I spent some time playing with TextPattern and the precursor of ExpressionEngine, pMachine. Since I’m now very interested in EE, I guess it makes sense also to take an interest in TP, and I have come upon a direct comparison between the two.
In this post, Jon Hicks achieves the kind of real-world evaluation of the two systems that I’m trying to arrive at. Distilling the key factors from this post (dated June 2008) and the many comments it has attracted …
Pro EE:
- The key thing: more fine grain control over everything (with some exceptions!).
- Other key thing: members and member management.
- Custom Fields – the level of control and ability to associate the fields with a certain section.
- Categories: these are a weak area in TXP, only allowing a maximum of 2, without clean URLs.
- The Multiple Site Manager is genius.
- You can edit the templates in a text editor, rather than via control panel. (You still have to create the template in EE first.)
Anti EE:
- The admin panel seems needlessly complicated, with options hidden behind many overly-wordy, illogical links and dropdowns.
- /index.php/ shouldn’t be in URLs by default, and it’s right pain to get rid of (but you can do it). Likewise, getting simple /section/title/ urls requires a lot of work.
- EE seems obsessed with statistics - time taken to render page etc.
- Tags: some require exp: at the start, some don’t.
- File management is behind Textpattern.There is a good file manager plugin for EE, but this review is looking at built-in functionality. (To the plugin.)
JH concludes that he prefers to work with TP except for sites that need members, forums and all that jazz. Having explored parts of the Control Panel, I have to agree that it is seriously convoluted. The preferences for a weblog are four layers down in the Control Panel, in Admin > Weblog Administration > Weblog Management. I’m thinking of compiling an offline manual from the online docs so that I can get my head around this multi-layered monster. BUT …
v2 of EE seems set to deal with the admin and file management issues, with a completely new Control Panel as explained in the recent sneak preview incorporating a new file manager as explained in another sneak preview.
The other key point from comments is that it is simple enough to remove index.php from the URL structure - “The resulting URLs are clean and human-readable and very intuitive on multiple levels,” says the commenter. I don’t dispute that observation, but I don’t rate the three available techniques “simple”, judging by the relevant wiki entry.
That said, when v2 of EE arrives it would seem that TP will no longer offer serious competition.