Textpattern VS ProcessWire

>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.

Bottom one looks better. First one reminds me of ProcessWire.

ProcessWireProcessWire is a fantastic CMS/CMF (content management framework) and I think it is a good fit for your skills. Works with any front end CSS although my personal preference is UIkitUIkit.

Over the years I have tried different frameworks, mostly in PHP, like Code Igniter (2010), ProcessWire (2014) and Laravel (2015).

The idea of tons of 3rd-party plugins, with WordPress and also Drupal, is just disastrous for security.

Anyone with any ability to write a little PHP would be far far better off building their site in a CMS like ProcessWire [1], which has a very small core, but a extremely powerful content (PHP) API [2], which means you can replicate pretty much everything you have in Wordpress and Drupal with a few API calls in your templates.

This means you build your listing and presentation-logic custom made with the minimal amount of code needed, and the attack vector shrinks to pretty much nothing, as long as you don't voluntarily do something stupid.

[1] https://processwire.com/

[2] https://cheatsheet.processwire.com/

It is incredibly rare that I see anyone mention ProcessWire. I used to use it years ago and still subscribe to regular emails. It is indeed a great CMS/CMF. https://processwire.com/

ProcessWire is one option.

Regardless of that, I'd like to throw in ProcessWire as an option. You basically define all your fields and templates you want to have in the admin, and then you create your templates. You can also use Page Classes to extend functions for a specific template. Your application sits in the "sites" folder and is separated from core. I'm running two websites with that one.

If you're a PHP user, check out ProcessWire.

I'm looking for a headless CMS solution that offers a good content editing strategy. I'm used to working with Statamic and Processwire, both of which allow you to create your own "Content blocks", which can be re-used by the editor / user and are set up in ways which allow you to define them.