Well would you expect me not to show up on such a thread ? Of course it didn’t take me to long, uh
?
I’ve started discussing Texpattern/MODx differences when I arrived here, 3 month ago in the thread
What did you use before MODx ?.
I went on about it on textpattern’s forum when I first mentionned MODx :
http://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?id=12490
You might find some things that’ll interrest you
But let’s sum it up and give a short answer : MODx is as flexible as Textpattern, with more features and expandability (though textpattern’s
elements might balance this a little bit).
As I said before, I came to MODx because Textpattern was lacking in some areas, especially for corporate websites :
- custom fields : in textpattern, you are limited to 10, and you can’t change the custome field’s type (it’s varchar(255) ). That’s where MODx is truly the king of them all : aside from ezPublish which is slow, I don’t know any CMS with so many degrees of freedom as far as custom fields are concerned. In fact, MODx goes even further than just custom fields if you consider the way you can combine them with @bindings and widgets
- illimited hierarchical levels : as you know, there you only have one level of depth (subcategories) which is not even truly hierarchical in textpattern. That’s a real problem when you try to build complex websites that need a deeper structure.
- Frontend editing : while textpattern has a plugin for this, it’s very limited compared to what MODx has to offer with QuickEdit, which to me is simply the best frontend editing available in the opensource world. It’s no small item in corporate environment, I see it everytime I demo the system
- Permissions : You have way more control over permission in MODx, one big item is that you can’t natively control access to pages in Textpattern (of course as usual you can use plugins/hack to do this, it’s less manageable, there are less options and it’s less secure).
[li]Content-type: the concept of documents is more adapted to corporate websites than that of articles. Textpattern is aimed at online publishing or blogging, MODx goes beyond with various content-type for documents (recently we talked about MODx’s ability to parse CSS documents which will allow for dynamic stylesheets )
That’s the major "pros" I would see that MODx has over Texpattern. MODx still lacks the ability to handle workflow but it will come in time. Revisionning would also be a plus in corporate environment.
That being said,
Textpattern has some big pros too : it’s light, it gives you full control over design (maybe it’s because I am learning MODx but sometimes I wish I had more control over the output html code) and you now have more than 280 high quality, feature rich plugins. One thing I still would like to have in MODx is the equivalent of
conditionnal tags (Edit : You know have it with PHx !) . In this regard, the filter parameter in the
NewsListing Ditto snippet is certainly heading the right way
I hope other major plugins give you the ability to define conditions to be tested, it’s very useful to avoid multiple templates (some textpattern websites I have build even have just one or two templates with several conditionnals, it’s a breeze to maintain and build).
Anyway, I must say I am using MODx more and more. I’ll probably use textpattern for very simple/small corporate websites, or those dedicated mainly to publishing or blogging (though MODx’s NewsListing has become somewhat of a killer blog ap : consider that you’ll be able to use fully customisable fields for your blog ! Imagine the possibilities, that is for power blogger or corporate blogging).
As I said somewhere, Textpattern is more a website management system than a content management system (yeah, we tend to dub every web application CMS while they’re not always tool to truly
manage content). Once MODx has both tagging and workflow, I think it will be the best content management system around (in many ways, it already is
But Drupal’s taxonomy module make it a better tool for managing complex content)
