sitepress VS Textpattern

I'm currently facing the same problem - adding a blog to a Rails app.

I thought Sitepress looks interesting, as its supposed to integrate with Rails. Have you given that one a try?

https://sitepress.cc/

I’ve been down this path enough times that I built https://sitepress.cc/, which lets you embed content in a rails app with features that are present in Jekyll, Middleman, etc. like Frontmatter, site hierarchy traversal, etc. It keeps content as files in the app/content directory, but when it’s time to pull data in from the Rails app for SEO, it’s all right there in the Rails app. There’s no “Headless CMS” crap to jump through.

For me, this is another way of keeping everything in a monolith, and which requires a lot less context switching. If I’m building a feature and I want to create marketing or support content for it, it’s all right there in the same repo. I just create the markdown files I need, commit them to the repo, and I’m don.

The thought of switching between a static content site or something like Webflow just seems silly. I think they only makes sense for huge teams.

In case you want something like Middleman (frontmatter, static compilation, ...), but embedable in your Rails app, Sitepress is really cool solution (you can even run it without Rails!): https://sitepress.cc

I went the opposite direction and built a static site generator on top of Rails: https://sitepress.cc/

Turns out, Rails is a really good web framework! I tried building Sitepress on something “light weight”, Tilt and Rack, and it was a pain. I found myself constantly solving the same problems that were already solved in Rails. At some point it dawned on me that I could just build on top of a few parts of Rails, so I did. I wrote about it at https://fly.io/ruby-dispatch/single-file-rails-app/

I’m glad I did! Now I can plug all of the Rails template handlers, view components, and other Rails plugins into it and ride off that entire communities docs.

If you find yourself thinking, “rails is too heavy”, consider shedding the parts of Rails that you don’t need. Then as your application grows in complexity and you find yourself needing more parts of Rails, bring it back in.

As I was building Sitepress (a site generator like Middleman, Jekyll, & Bridgetown), I stumbled into the idea that a Rails application can exist in a single file and wrote about it at https://fly.io/ruby-dispatch/single-file-rails-app/.

Agreed. I built https://sitepress.cc/ that uses git + files to manage content in Rails, but it needs an editor.

I’m not sure if the right thing to do is build a web editor or smooth out git workflows so that non-technical people can open content files with desktop software to make changes to the content.

I created https://sitepress.cc/ because you can have both! It can run a dynamic content site from a Rails app or it can compile out pages that can be deployed to any static website host.

It doesn’t have a front end for authoring pages, styles, etc, but that could be built on top of this library.

I was using Middleman for a while, but then grew tired of all the dependencies I had to always keep up-to-date. I did the completely illogical thing and built my own static site generator, https://sitepress.cc/

A few years later and I ended up deleting most of it and replacing the internals with Rails. Now Sitepress is just a tiny rails application sitting on top of a bunch of files. Most of the maintenance and dependencies are handled by major Rails lib maintainers.

When you deploy it, you can compile it into static files and deploy as you’d expect, but you can also deploy it as a rails or rack app … or even embed it into an existing rails app.

When Rails 7.0 gets released I’ll drop JS importmaps into the default install for free and have my dream static site generator that doesn’t have a huge asset compilation step.

>What's with the insistence of running it off of just MySQL?

I think the most honest answer here is that it's planned but not scheduled. There's an open issue to update Textpattern to PDO:

https://github.com/textpattern/textpattern/issues/345

…which will open up a whole new world of possibilities.

The Textpattern dev team & user base is pretty small, and the user base is largely patient, so Textpattern can sometimes fall into a trap of being 'good enough for now' and go for extended periods of time with few commits. What tends to happen is a release is scheduled, takes place, and then the plans for the next release are more forefront in our minds. The most recent release was nearly two years ago, which is a long time in Textpattern terms, but I'm confident we can get Textpattern 4.9 into the release pipeline this winter. More on that here:

https://github.com/textpattern/textpattern/issues/1879

https://github.com/textpattern/textpattern/releases.atom

Depends on the need...I have a quick LibreOffice HTML template in light or dark. I include metas for mobile use in the document properties. I also have a PHP controller that can easily modify these if I need it to be more dynamic.

Otherwise I use https://picocss.com/ for some things.

For publishing I either drop the HTML file in a folder with or without a controller, or start a new endpoint by creating a new section in TXP [1] and drop in whatever HTML and txp xml tags I need there.

1. https://textpattern.com/

Textile was the driving markup behind Textpattern (https://textpattern.com/), one of the better publishing/CMS tools out there on PHP. It had a nice object oriented approach that was less painful than Wordpress, and gave great flexibility to design aspects in ways that were easier to work with than Wordpress... but Wordpress won the popular marketshare, and TP was relegated to some diehards. Those diehards still pump out fixes and features, and it's worth a look at https://github.com/textpattern/textpattern/ if you want to see something a bit different.

>It bills itself as a "Content Management System", which I've always thought was an amorphous term. I suppose you could use it for a blog, wiki, or something similar.

Textpattern person here. It's readily usable as a blog, corporate site, etc. A wiki would be less straightforward, especially if you have multiple users doing stuff, since we don't have any revision history built into the core software.

Textpattern 4.0.0 (the first production version) was released in 2005, and we're currently working on Textpattern 4.8.8 for release in Q4 this year after PHP 8.1 lands at the end of November.

The 4.9 release series is also being worked on, we'll probably see the first cut from that branch in 2022.

Some links:

* https://github.com/textpattern/textpattern (core software)

* https://forum.textpattern.com/ (community forum)

* https://docs.textpattern.com (docs)

* https://textpattern.co/demo (demo landing page)

* https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=textpattern (CVEs on mitre.org)

Wordpress made a great impact on the net, and I was happy when clients liked its ease of use and relieved from the burden of making content changes. (Though, I've always felt that https://textpattern.com/ was more secure and better than Wordpress).

Consider Textpattern.