Wednesday June 30, 2004 / Filed under: Web Design
Published with Textpattern
The Notebook section is driven by a new content managment system called Textpattern. Textpattern is the work of the talented and somewhat curmudgeony Dean Allen, proprietor of Textism. Textpattern is still under development, but it works just fine for me so far.
For a few other projects, I have used MovableType, a nice CMS specifically designed for weblogs. Even though Textpattern is unfinished, it’s more responsive and easier to use. This is partly due, no doubt, to the fact that TP is completely dynamic—every page here is generated on-the-fly, pulling elements from a database as needed. MT takes a different approach—actual HTML files for each page are built whenever you make changes. If a change affects every page in the site, this can take some time. With TP, no change takes more than a few seconds, even if it affects every page on the site. I’m sure there is some downside to this approach, but I haven’t found it yet.
The other nice thing about Textpattern is that it automatically takes care of a lot of the little text formatting details, like using typographer’s quote marks, real em-dashes, and so on. For someone like me who is very picky about type, this is very handy.
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