It was always my intention to have a blog when I eventually got around to producing my personal portfolio. All my experience with blog design had been in Wordpress and so that was the obvious choice, so why did I end up with Textpattern?

Don’t get me wrong, I love Wordpress, I think it deserves all the hype it gets – but to my mind it isn’t a content management system. I decided early on that I didn’t just want a portfolio gallery; I wanted individual pages for each piece of work, so I began delving into how I could go about doing this in Wordpress. It was possible but it just didn’t seem logical to me (I am a bit of a perfectionist, I like things to be in the right place) and so I decided to look elsewhere. I have to admit I had seen Textpattern before but was put-off by the somewhat stripped down website and lack of obvious community support so I hadn’t bothered to dig too deep.

I eventually decided to bite the bullet and give it a go when Jamie Knight kept harping on about it on a little forum I frequent. It was certainly harder to pick up than wordpress; I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who just wants to blog straight from installation but for me, it was perfect.

The terminology of how all the data is handled took me a while to get my head around and I didn’t enjoy first learning about how to make static pages (it’s not as easy as you’d think) but generally climbing the learning curve was a pleasurable experience. What I really love about Textpattern, though, is that it makes sense – if you are passionate about semantic coding and truly separating content, design and data management then Textpattern is for you. The developers haven’t gone out of their way to give out-of-the-box functionality but if you want to do something then the logical solution is almost always the way to do it in Textpattern.

I can see myself developing plenty of client websites using Textpattern in the future – even if they don’t want to be able to update it themselves; the search function alone is worth it!

So, here it is, my first attempt at a website built in Textpattern. How did I do?