I’ve spent the last ten plus years of my life writing code for the web. I started with the Microsoft set of tools, ASP and Access. Oh those were the days… well maybe not! I can still remember being in high school spending hours down in the basement working on website after website; writing horrible spaghetti code that was impossible to maintain. After a while I moved along into the ranks of a “professional developer”, starting out again with the Microsoft set of tools and after a few years there I again migrated to the world of Java.

For the last five or six yeas I’ve been maintaining a bunch of websites written in a bunch of different languages and its been driving me nuts! So, a while back I started looking for a better way to build sites, something that will let me focus on getting a functional website created in a short amount of time that will also allow my customers (and me) ease of maintenance. Well, I’ve found it!

This site was recreated in about a day’s worth of time from a home grown “pile of ASP and SQL Server code” to textpattern; and I couldn’t be happier. Textpattern is a great tool, it’s a bit confusing when you start, but once you get the hang of it, it’s awesome! I’ve already re-built a couple of client websites using textpattern and have been working on doing more and more as the days go by.

How can you beat it, its open source, well maintained, extensible and quite simple to use once you figure it out. Now don’t get me wrong here, I’m no php guru, but after spending a couple of days playing with textpattern, I’m already in hacking and tweaking plugin’s all over the place. The tool is flexible, performs really well, and so far the administrative functions have been nothing but helpful for my clients.

I’ll spend a little bit of time over the next few weeks posting some of the code used to build this site; as well as some snippets from a few others. I’ll also spend some time writing about the different aspects of the tool as I understand them… Hopefully all of this information will be helpful to others that are working on moving to this awesome tool! But until then, its back to my next textpattern project; a complete rebuild for my church’s website. It will be XHMTL and fully CSS compliant, and built in textpattern. I’m excited, its going to look great, work great and be much easier for the staff to update on a consistent basis! What are you waiting for, check out textpattern for yourself!

Categories: Web Development