Textpattern VS lokl

>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.

I've used GeneratePress and their blocks. I might give SimplyStatic another shot this weekend, this time with full site editing and a fse theme I'm making. I also want to try another alternative. SimplyStatic was forked from an earlier version of wp2static included in the bundle.

Timely plug for Lokl, which I just put out a new release for over weekend :) Allows creating/managing a bunch of WP sites locally, optimized for deploying statically.

I've switched from the Jamstack/static site generators to nocode WordPress for content sites, to focus my coding more on app UIs in the long term.

Jamstack is nice, but it's either for personal developer blogs or larger teams. Outsourcing is too expensive with coders being in high demand.

Everything WP can be easily outsourced when needed, and there really isn't much of a speed benefit with Jamstack sites if you cache your WP site on the edge (e.g. with Cloudflare APO). Security of the origin server isn't a problem with a good host or going static.

You can generate static sites from a local WP install if you find secure hosting too expensive, here's a nice docker based tool for this: https://lokl.dev/

WP is really as hard, ugly fast or slow as you make it, you have to find the right theme and plugin ecosystem within WP.

I don't have to and don't need touch the code building sites with it, so all those weird WP code conventions don't really bother me.

There’s also lokl.dev from the wp2static dev

It might be worth mentioning that Lokl [0] seems to be from the same author [1] as the "wp2static" plugin [2], my and many others go to for static site generation of WordPress.

I find Lokl and interesting take, although the usual self-serve script is kind of annoying for power users (what I mean is that this bash scripts tried to do everything for you and it's less transparent), I recommend the repo [4] as the source of the actual Dockerfiles, that you could just reference in something like a docker-compose setup.

The Dockerfiles are kind of surprising since they read more like a an ansible-playbook than like a Dockerfile. This one image has it all - php, nginx, mariadb, phpmyadmin and who knows what else [4]. It's an interesting approach to Docker images, certainly against the recommendation but might have some good reasoning for something as special as WordPress.

[0]: https://github.com/leonstafford/lokl-cli

[1]: https://github.com/leonstafford

[2]: https://github.com/leonstafford/wp2static

[3]: https://github.com/leonstafford/lokl

[4]: https://github.com/leonstafford/lokl/blob/master/php8/Docker...

For Automation, I've got full end to end tests using it in the main https://github.com/leonstafford/lokl repo. Just 1 E2E test in there so far, but that's what I'm planning to use to generate living documentation for the project itself and my SSGs included with it (I suck at maintaining docs otherwise!).

I thought the reddit discussion did a better job explaining it, but here are the direct links:

https://lokl.dev/

https://github.com/leonstafford/lokl

The developer, Leon Stafford, is also working hard on WP plugins that convert to static sites and even upload directly to popular services such as Cloudflare, Netlify, Amazon, etc.

(I am not associated with this project.)