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Textpattern

Drupal from a Textpattern developer's perspective

5 min read

I have been working and developing websites with the wonderful Textpattern content management system (CMS) for a number of years now; a few months ago I started developing with Drupal through work.  A love-hate relationship between Drupal and myself is being forged. Here are just a few of my thoughts on Drupal so far.

Some negative points

I'll start with the negative and move on to the positive (I'm going to try and keep this balanced).

Drupal's UI from the admin side of the site is hellish! In comparison with Textpattern's well organised tabbed interface Drupal's just seems chaotic. Figuring out where to control different aspects of the site can be really frustrating and not helped as the number of modules installed increases. From what I have seen the next big release of Drupal (version 7) is going to make huge improvements in this area. In the meantime installing modules like Admin menu are a must in order to maintain some sanity when dealing with the CMS.

Theming is not that straightforward. So okay you can easily theme the front page, the nodes dependent on content type, and individual blocks, but this is still (for me) too restrictive. If the layout of a page differs significantly from other parts of the site it can become a real pain. We've been experimenting with the Context module that seems to make life much easier, but when compared with Textpattern's page layouts and forms it just isn't the same. I also much prefer the XML-style tags of Textpattern over the use of PHP in Drupal.

One final point on theming Drupal, and this one is really important to the work we do, it can be very challenging getting a website to be standards-compliant; this especially seems to be the case when the Views module is in use (and when is it not on a Drupal site?). Standards-compliance is core to the design and thinking of Textpattern and that's partly why I love it!

The core installation is bloated. Again, this is another thing where I just plain prefer Textpattern. The core install of Textpattern is lightweight it does practically everything you'd want to get a basic site running in no time. The number of modules pre-installed with Drupal is just crazy (many of the core modules I haven't even needed)! To add to that, to get Drupal to a point where it is useful requires a number of additional modules installing.

The good stuff

Okay, enough of all that negativity; there are a number of things that I do like about Drupal.

Content types make creating content simple. I've really wanted this sort of feature for Textpattern for a long time. It strikes me as important for a CMS to be able to distinguish between different types of content; not everything on a site will be an 'article', there will be pages, blogs, news articles, etc. for which different information is required. Content types in Drupal let you do this and become really powerful with the addition of CCK fields (that will be part of core from Drupal 7). Yes Textpattern can handle custom fields for articles by default, and the sed_section_fields plugin can give you more control over these; however, you seem to end up with a lot of wasted space in the database table and I'm not convinced this is a straightforward approach for the end-user.

Taxonomy. This has got to be one of Drupal's biggest strengths. This is an incredibly flexible approach to organising site content. You can define unlimited vocabularies of unlimited terms that can be ordered into hierarchies. This is something more than your average CMS's categories or tags. Taxonomy makes Textpattern's categories and keywords (that can be turned into tags using the brilliant tru_tags plugin) feel very awkward. Basically taxonomy is cool!

There are lots of freely available modules. Drupal has a massive community and a lot of people developing modules to expand the possibilities of the core installation. Modules like CCK, Image Cache, and Views are invaluable to any install (although I also have plenty of gripes about the powerful Views module). On the downside the documentation can be very poor.

Final thoughts

As I am getting more and more familiar with Drupal I am finding more to love and hate about it. It is clearly a powerful piece of kit and is working well for our clients, delivering what they need. I do have many frustrations with it, but then I can also find Textpattern frustrating at times. Which is better? Well I don't think there is a simple answer to that and I am not going to try and answer it here; in the end it really depends what the end-user requires. Perhaps that's a future post when I've been working with Drupal a little longer...

© 2024 Andy Carter