Hacker | Engineer

A friend of me recently asked why I use Textpattern for all three of my blogs. Most people don’t even host their own blogs these days, and the rest either use Wordpress or something they rolled from scratch. So why do I use an off-the-shelf blog engine that’s not Wordpress? Flexibility, speed, and security.

Textpattern isn’t really a blogging engine. It’s a CMS that can do blogs easily. For my personal site, I was migrating from hand-written HTML, and I wanted some flexibility to build a site that wasn’t just a blog. As it turned out, I couldn’t even keep the blog updated, much less the rest of the site, but I got addicted to the flexibility. Yes, you can make “real websites” with Wordpress, but there’s a point at which you’re working within the confines of your CMS. Textpattern’s Page/Form + Article model is amazingly flexible, and theming the whole thing with CSS is a cinch. If I want to tweak something, Textpattern’s tag-based markup language often makes it trivial. It would be hard for me to give up the flexibility of Textpattern, especially now that I’ve grown so used to it.

Have you ever noticed how Wordpress blogs always go down when they get Slasdotted or Dugg? From what I’ve heard (and seen), Wordpress is a mess inside. It’s more talky to the database than a poorly-written Rails view! It’s slow, monolithic, and…just gross. Ironically, my Textpattern blog was dreadfully slow for a few months until I figured out the comment system was hitting a defunct spam-checking site to weed out bad comments. Turning that off brought things back to blazing speed. Someday I might write something important, and I’d like for as many people to be able to read it as possible. Speed matters.

Script kiddies seem to love Wordpress. It seems like there’s not a month that goes by without another major Wordpress exploit. There are tools out there to completely automate the process of compromising a Wordpress blog and gaining full access to the underlying filesystem. Yikes! Yes, they’re usually pretty good about patching, but until very recently upgrading Wordpress was a bitch. Not only do I trust the Textpattern developers more, but so few people use it compared to Wordpress’s userbase that it’s not nearly as appealing a target. I like to sleep sound knowing my websites aren’t compromised.

Many of the reasons I chose Textpattern have become irrelevant or resolved, but now that I’ve gotten good at it I’m not about to switch. I like Textile, the flexibility is wonderful, and it Just Works. What more could you want from a CMS?