At this stage, I have no idea if TextPattern will stay or not. In the very foreseeable future, I will have to write/implement something for content management for my father. This was actually one of the driving forces for installed a few different blogging packages to see if I could use one of these and build upon it to save myself considerable time.
Initially I installed WordPress, however at this stage (v1.2.2), it doesn’t support multiple blogs and categories of those blogs. As such, if I wanted to maintain a nice clean URL structure (and who doesn’t, really?), I would need to install multiple copies of it and prefix each installation with the section name of the site. A very poor hack in my opinion. That said, apparently version 1.5 of WordPress will support it so I might come back to it before I get into this fully.
Directly after removing WordPress, I installed TextPattern. This system in my opinion is far more complex and the user interface isn’t anywhere near as intuitive, however might be more powerful. This package supports multiple blogs (sections of your site) and categories, which is excellent. However, it doesn’t support categories of a sections (just gross categories for your entire site). I essentially want to end up with a URL structure like somedomain.com/about/site/database/ and somedomain.com/about/site/language/ and so forth. Nice clean URLs that are future proof.
The other key thing I need is the ability to write modules for it. Among the simple content management that I require, I will also need to write a module/component to act as a simple shopping cart/gallery. My father intends to list stock on there and to have descriptions of that stock with images and so forth.
I can only hope that WordPress comes to the rescue before I need to start doing this and pray the source for it is clean an extensible. If it isn’t, I will be putting more time into completing my own content management system and components for them to use.
