there’s a nice little debate going on over at the textpattern support forums regarding the pros and cons of ee vs. txp. join in if you are so inclined.
Oh- that is a really nice discussion. I can’t chime in, as I’ve never used textpattern. Only heard good things about it, though. Not sure why it wasn’t one I tried out when I was first trying to figure out what blog software I wanted to use. I tried a LOT!
The open source debates always fascinate me. When I was plowing through my options, phpnuke was exploding into a ton of variants. A LOT of mud slinging between the various off shoots. For a complete noob to the whole cms/blog software game, it kind of put me off of open source as an option for the script. I decided a benign dictatorship was preferable.
However, I’ve seen Joomla really hang together through a crisis, and I think wordpress could probably hang together in a non-insane format if such internal strife were to hit. I’d be a lot more inclined to go with an open source script now than I was back then. I mean- I always liked the philosophy, but it seemed like the reality was just plain unstable. That nuke fighting was nasty and confusing!
Well, you can read my thoughts about open source here. After reading those thoughts, let us talk about the actual problems mentioned about ExpressionEngine.
1. Man, I totally agree about Trackback support not being a ‘pro’ for any system or not having it a ‘negative’. My optimism for it ever rising from the ashes is quite low.
2. Our URLs are not as search engine friendly? Personally, I love our URLs. With a quick removal of index.php, they look beautiful. Bah!
3. ‘Modules are late and scarce.’ 24 available modules in 1.5. Call me crazy but is that bad? Instead of selling them separately Rick and I decided to simply bundle them with the program. Hm, apologies for not having them out sooner but, um, I was sleeping on the job. The forum module was delayed because Rick went all out on it. We have a habit of not doing anything small and simple because we lack self restraint. Our curse…
4. Ah, the plugin argument. I love this argument because people simply look at numbers and not the system or actual plugins. Let us see, if we remove the duplicate plugins for Textpattern that do the exact same thing and the ones already natively done by EE (you need a plugin to change the comment field lengths?!), then add to EE’s plugin list the third party modules and extensions out there (many many which are shared with the community) since those would be considered plugins by Textpattern…I think those numbers become a great deal closer. ::shrug:: Still a difference but the argument loses a great deal of weight. Perhaps Les’ project will help increase the sharing of said add-ons.
5. The Control Panel. Everyone has an opinion about the Control Panel. As power and flexibility increases in a software program the ability to make it easy to access that power and flexibility decreases. Reminds me of the supermarket where there are ten different kinds of peanut butter and twenty kinds of jelly, jam, or preserve. While I do not agree that the CP is ugly, I do agree it has some heft to it and plenty of intimidation for the beginner. I am definitely looking at the Admin section primarily. There is a difficulty there that we have not yet cracked and might require 2.0’s features to solve.
6. Syntax. This is just people being silly. Everything has a different syntax and, most of them, once you learn them they just feel natural. We went for something simple (tag, attributes, variables) but was distinguishable from HTML easily.
7. Cost. Well, we made a free Core version, lowered the price of Non-Commercial by $50, and for developers we increased the bulk purchase discounts in March. Honestly, if you do not need EE’s power, then you are likely not going to pay for it. I make no apologies for wanting dinner.
Yet another debate about EE. Personally, I just love the exposure. Even when people poo-poo EE they are still talking about EE and I bet if we check our incoming referrals we’ll see traffic coming in from Txp, which is just lovely for us.
Yes, the amount of plugins / hacks / mods required to do basic things in TextPattern (going from reading their forums, not from personal experience) is astounding. In that case, 147 plugins is con. Just look at our Feature Request forum—a large majority of things people want to see in the core product would live fine as a plugin, module, or extension. They don’t want that though, most of the time. They want a button in the control panel that says “Hey, James, this is for you!” I’ve even heard users go as far to say that extensions are nothing more than temporary hack-preventers whilst awaiting for something to become a core feature (I couldn’t disagree more).
And thus the tight rope of balancing ease of use, power, and feature creep. I think we’ve done pretty well, personally.
While I can see the appeal of comparing software on technical merit, features, or whatnot, there is really only one metric that matters: Does it get the job done within any applicable constraints?
I have used Drupal for years and I’m very happy with it. As far as my needs are concerned, it is either superior to EE or perhaps I’m simply way ahead on the learning curve. I’m nevertheless migrating some of my sites (perhaps all) to EE for a simple reason: I can’t stand the pain of upgrading Drupal anymore (specifically, getting all contributed modules to work again). For me, EE is virtually feature-complete out of the box. Once I figure out to make EE do what I want it to without neglecting a toddler to take care of, I’ll have made a large one-time “capital” expense in terms of personal time, as opposed to recurring costs that add up in time.
I read Paul’s blog entry and Leslie’s response on the Textpattern forum. I don’t know how we got wrapped up in talking about EE on Textpattern’s forum but it’s always good to debate differences in systems.
EE is one of the few commercial apps that I follow, I’m always checking back to see what’s new and use it as a measuring stick in any Open Source project that I’m involved in. No, I’m not stealing ideas, but I do look at the your progress.
In my case the price of EE has no bearing, I just prefer to own my code. I’ve been in this industry for over 20 years, I’ve seen more technology go away than I care to mention. I’m not saying that EE will drop off the face of the map tomorrow, it’s just they way I think at this stage of my career.
So if I champion Open Source over anything else, that’s just the way it’s hanging at the moment, no offense.
Well, I’ve played with Drupal, but not that much. My guess is you’re simply behind on the learning curve with EE
What you say is true, though, EE is rather painless to maintain and upgrade.
I had to use it for a project at NetRaising. After the experience I can say that while I’m a fan of the ideas and the sentiment behind the software I am not a fan of the implementation.
Things are referred to by multiple interchangeable terms all through the interface. The templates and the code are a hopelessly convoluted mire of includes. Even the CSS has a mess of includes in it. Some tags in the templates have 3 id’s assigned to them?!!! What crazy person decided that was a good idea? And the one time we upgraded it we had create some custom SQL statements and create a second running copy of the site. The software is in serious need of a strong lead developer to fix/change/veto/and otherwise prevent things from becoming crazier than they already are.
But more on topic.
I’ve not had a chance to use TXP though I have checked it out from time to time. I previously have used MovableType (when it was free) and various versions of PHPNuke. I also setup a WordPress blog once and found the number of plugins I had to use to match features with EE daunting. In all the cases I’ve experienced EE was a wonderful thing in comparison. And of course comfort has something to do with my reasons for staying with it. I’m comfortable here but I keep up on what’s new. And really, I haven’t seen anything that has made me want to change yet.
And quite contrary to the complaints I read on the TXP forum about the support here? I’ve always had wonderful support from the community and the company.
Also on the owning code bit. I’ve done a little work here and there on Open Source projects and from my understanding of the majority of licenses just because the project is Open Source it doesn’t mean you retain any kind of ownership over the code. And just because the code is free it doesn’t mean that someone or some group doesn’t actually still own the code itself. In fact one of the Open Source advocates here is very adamant about this. You don’t own the code to FireFox when you download it. The Mozilla Foundation does. They are simply giving you permission to use and edit the code. Maybe its semantics but people who care greatly about Open Source seem to feel the distinction is important.
And pMachine doesn’t have any problem with me posting a hack to the EE files if others might find it useful. The fact that I can’t release my own version of EE doesn’t prevent me from making changes and sharing how to make those changes if I or others need them.
OK, I’m done. Can you tell I’m avoiding some of my work right now?
4. Ah, the plugin argument. I love this argument because people simply look at numbers and not the system or actual plugins. Let us see, if we remove the duplicate plugins for Textpattern that do the exact same thing and the ones already natively done by EE (you need a plugin to change the comment field lengths?!), then add to EE’s plugin list the third party modules and extensions out there (many many which are shared with the community) since those would be considered plugins by Textpattern…I think those numbers become a great deal closer. ::shrug:: Still a difference but the argument loses a great deal of weight. Perhaps Les’ project will help increase the sharing of said add-ons.
I don’t have anything to add to this discussion right now (too tired) but what is this project about?
I don’t have anything to add to this discussion right now (too tired) but what is this project about?
The project is creating a combined area for plugins-extensions-modules. If you’ve spent anytime at all looking for something that extends EE that isn’t a plugin you’ve probably noticed this is difficult. It shouldn’t be. It should be as easy as finding a plugin. Of course, creating a simple list is easy. The tricky part is figuring out how to let 3rd party developers support their creations, update their code with new versions, etc…
On the topic of open source tools, this IBM developerworks article has a run down of some of the more popular products they evaluated for their example project. They eventually went for drupal (which for a purely community based site isn’t a bad thing), but I have to agree with Jamie that from a designer’s point of view, the themeing system is nightmareish. Personally after reading the run down it just made me thankful EE exists!
As for the EE vs TXP debate, its hard to see any of the objections raised as actual problems. Open source vs closed in this context is more ideological and financial than anything.
On the whole bigger community/more plugins thing, I was interested to read this recent post on Nick Denton’s blog:
In search of Movable Type expertise · We always thought that it would be an advantage to Gawker to use Movable Type as a publishing platform. A host of plug-ins to provide additional functionality, and a community of developers to tap. Well, in practice, the plug-ins have been the bane of our existence: some are incompatible, others resource hogs. And the great community of MT developers is more impressive in theory than in practice. Gawker’s scouting for a couple of MT experts in NYC right now. Without much success. Six Apart doesn’t have a directory of MT-savvy developers, and the forums aren’t much help either. If you’re reading this, and you have the skills, email…
While MT isn’t open source, the same principle applies - while there may be a team of devs to continue a project, who’s to say the plugin your site relies on will be maintained over the long term? Better that essential functionality is in the core of the product.
I also don’t know that small is bad - as Paul argues in his blog post, a small tight dev team that allows solid, consistent design & functionality in an app seems good to me. It just as much about the quality of ideas behind the code than the sheer quantity of it.
I’m by far not a genius (hence the reason I almost always have to look up how to spell the word genius) but a few weeks ago I converted my EE site to TXP because I wanted to be able to see how they both worked. I’d previously used textpattern, but was too lazy to really learn my way around it - so I went back this time ready to give it a go.
I do like that the admin interface is pretty, but I’m a girl and I appreciate pretty I’ve since then converted my site back to EE because with the txp Sections/Articles/Forms, it just didn’t seem as organic as the way EE was laid out. Plugin installs were nice, but when I’m using EE - I get everything done without having to use plugins, so that was relatively unimportant to me. I hated txp’s image uploads although I am aware that there are some plugins to rectify this.
I prefer the tag structure in EE, but both of them were pretty similar and I was suprised by that when I was working/converting - so I’m not sure where the ugly tags part comes in.
I think both EE and TXP have a pretty big learning curve though but I think that with a tiny bit of patience, either one isn’t all that hard to learn.
I converted my site from Blogger to EE Core a few months ago. I looked at EE Core, MovableType, and Textpattern. I downloaded all three, and intended to test all three. I started with EE Core (because a friend was using the Personal version and she loved it). The only problem with Core that I haven’t been able to solve is the importation of comments from my Blogger-powered site (I’ve found a way to do it, I just haven’t taken the time to do it).
I wasn’t able to get either MT or Textpattern to install on my server. I tried multiple times with both. I even re-downloaded the software to ensure that the one I initially downloaded wasn’t corrupt. I finally gave up on them and stuck with EE Core. I really wanted to give Textpattern a shot. The lack of an easy installation changed my mind.
EDIT:
Just read through the discussion over on the other boards. Some posters seemed to be hung up on the open vs. closed source aspect, and the fear that a closed-source software company can stop development at any time. So? I like how Core works now. There’s an upgrade to a newer version than what I started with that I’ve downloaded, but not installed. I also keep all of my downloads, so if for some reason my installed version should happen to crap out, I can simply reinstall from the version(s) I have on my HD.
I don’t quite think so. I use GIMP myself, don’t get me wrong, but there are areas where it can’t hold a candle to Photoshop. Whereas with EE vs TxP, we’re definitely talking equals.
