Tinkering with Textpattern
Published on 26th April 2011 Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutesWhile Textpattern 5 may be on the way, that isn't to imply that work on the 4.x branch is completely stopped, though it is less of a priority at the moment. After all, version 4.40 was slipped out not so long ago as a security release, a discovery that I made while giving a section of my outdoors website a spring refresh. During that activity, the TinyMCE plugin started to grate with its issuing of error messages in the form of dialogue boxes needing user input to get rid of them every time an article was opened or saved. Because of that nuisance, the guilty hak_tinymce plugin was ejected, with joh_admin_ckeditor replacing it and bringing CKEditor into use for editing my Textpattern articles. It is working well, even if the narrow editing area is causing the editor toolbars to take up too much vertical space, yet you can resize the editor to solve this, though it would be better if it could be made to remember those size settings.
Another find was atb_editarea, a plugin that colour codes (X)HTML, PHP and CSS by augmenting the standard text editing for pages and stylesheets in the Presentation part of the administration interface. If I had this at the start of my redesign, it would have made doing the needful that bit more user-friendly than the basic editing facilities that Textpattern offers by default. Of course, the tinkering never stops, so there's no such thing as finding something too late in the day for it to be useful.
Textpattern may not be getting the attention that some of its competitors are getting, but it isn't being neglected either; its users and developer community see to that. Saying that, it needs to get better at announcing new versions of the CMS so they don't slip by the likes of me, who isn't looking all the time. With a major change of version number involved, curiosity is aroused as to what is coming next. So far, Textpattern appears to be taking an evolutionary course, and there's a lot to be said for such an approach.
It's a great CMS, isn't it? Seems like there should be a way to make those CKEditor changes permanent, though.
I really like the way they're continuing with meaningful releases to the 4.x branch while working on 5.
I get the impression that it's one of the more flexible CMS's out there. After spending a little time learning Textile, you can set things up how they are needed without feeling that you are limited by what you are using to do the job. That the new releases have been evolutionary and don't involve upset really helps too. Having CKEditor remembering its sizing would be icing on the cake for me.