Textpattern VS Grav

>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.

There are flat-file CMSes (content management systems) like Grav: https://getgrav.org/

I guess, in some vague/broad sense, config-as-code systems also implement something similar? Maybe even OpenAPI schemas could count to some degree...?

In the old days, the "semantic web" movement was an attempt to make more webpages both human- and machine-readable indefinitely by tagging them with proper schema: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework. Even Google was on board for a while, but I guess it never saw much uptake. As far as I can tell it's basically dead now, both because of non-semantic HTML (everything as a React div), general laziness, and LLMs being able to parse things loosely.

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Side thoughts...

Philosophically, I don't know that capturing raw data alone as files is really sufficient to capture the nuances of any particular experience, or the overall zeitgeist of an era. You can archive Geocities pages, but that doesn't really capture the novelty and indie-ness of that era. Similarly, you can save TikTok videos, but absent the cultural environment that created them (and a faithful recreation of the recommendation algorithm), they wouldn't really show future archaeologists how teenagers today lived.

I worked for a natural history museum for a while, and while we were there, one of the interesting questions (well, to me anyway) was whether our web content was in and of itself worth preserving as a cultural artifact -- both so that future generations can see what exhibits were interesting/apropos for the cultures of our times, but also so they could see how our generation found out about those exhibitions to begin with (who knows what the Web will morph into 50 years later). It wasn't enough to simply save the HTML of our web pages, both because they tie into various other APIs and databases (like zoological collections) and because some were interactive experiences, like games designed to be played with a mouse (before phones were popular), or phone chatbots with some of our specimens. To really capture the experience authentically would've required emulating not just our tech stacks and devices, among other things.

Like for the earlier Geocities example, sure you could just save the old HTML and render it with a modern browser, but that's not the same as something like https://oldweb.today/?browser=ns3-mac#http://geocities.com/ , which emulates the whole OS and browser too. And that still isn't the same as having to sit in front of a tiny CRT and wait minutes for everything to download over a 14.4k modem, only to be interrupted when mom had to make a call.

I guess that's a longwinded of critiquing "file over app": It only makes sense for things that are originally files/documents to begin with. Much of our lives now are not flat docs but "experiences" that take much more thought and effort to archive. If the goal is truly to preserve that posterity, it's not enough to just archive their raw data, but to develop ways to record and later emulate entire experiences, both technological and cultural. It ain't easy!

I took a more traditional approach, focusing on something that's "good enough", which in my case was a cheap VPS and an install of Grav: https://getgrav.org/

Some optional customization for page templates/fonts/CSS, some CI so I can build and deploy it inside of a Docker container, Matomo for analytics that respect privacy (which I already use elsewhere) and some additional web server configuration to hide anything interesting behind an additional login and I'm good. Maybe backups and uptime monitoring if I'm feeling brave, which is what most sites should also have (so copy + paste there).

All of that for under 100 euros per year (could also pay half of that if I didn't host anything else on the server), the blog has actually survived getting on the front page of HN once or twice and requires relatively little maintenance, at least a bit less than a proper install of WordPress, due to its larger surface area.

The best thing is that it's simple enough for me to understand how it works, to be able to move it anywhere as needed and use more or less plain Markdown for writing the blog posts. Here's a quick example of a recent post: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/ever-wanted-to-read-thousan...

Now all that's left is to find motivation to write more, but at least 90% of my time doesn't go into tinkering with custom fancy solutions, no matter how much I'd love that. Then again, nothing wrong with the alternatives either: 400 euros might be perfectly worth it for some, whereas working with static site generators or even custom CMSes would be a fun experience for others!

I'd check out Grav. https://getgrav.org/

Also, there is a CMS called Grav. Both Gravity and Grav use a very similar (but not identical) font for their logo.

I would use a flat file cms like https://getgrav.org