Read WordPress’ About Us page and you’ll get an idea of how big they are:

[Wordpress]… has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

They deserve it. Their product is as awesome as their commitment to improving it. WordPress has evolved from a blogging platform into a powerful CMS fit for many different types of websites.

WordPress is great for web designers with little programming knowledge that have clients that require a certain degree of customisation. For example, a business that needs a check out process that follows a particular path. For this purpose, though, Textpattern is much better.

Textpattern is the holy grail for web designers lacking programming skills

There are many of these around.

A client may ask…

I want a list of the 5 latest news items on the homepage, but the first one must feature an image and the other four as simple links. I don’t want any news items listed that are Press Releases, though, and it’s one from the Photos section it should also include its thumbnail.

This can’t be achieved in HTML alone, of course. A non-programmer would not be able to define such a dynamic.

Textpattern, instead, allows extensive control over dynamic content without the need for programming. It uses an XML-style tag system that is intuitive that looks more like HTML than PHP.

This tag, for example, lists 5 links to pages in the News section of a website that have been associated to a category called ‘Apples’. But only if the page that displays it is associated to a second category called ‘Red Fruit’:

<txp:if_article_category name=“Apples”>
<txp:article_custom form=“list.articles” section=“News” category=“Red Fruit” limit=“5” />
<txp:else />
<p>Sorry, there are no articles about apples.<p>
</txp:if_article_category>

The form=“list.articles” bit specifies the HTML code that will be repeated. It could looks something like this:

<p><txp:article_image /><txp:permlink><txp:title /> <br /><txp:category2 link=“1” title=“1” /></txp:permlink>

To output an article list comprised of a linked title, category and image.

Easy! Textpattern offers many such tags out of the box to allow for all sorts of behaviours. Tons more are available as plugins.

Google wants to make programming simple too

Hence, their efforts to provide such a language via a project called, rather appropriately, Simple.

With Google Sites, though, they’ve made things too simple too the extent that even a GeoCities (R.I.P.) website would have been more customisable.

I’m not a Google Sites expert, to be honest, but it seems to me they are trying to achieve a system where one can plug content and feeds into pages as ‘modules’. Isn’t iGoogle a bit like that?

The plan: Google to buy Textpattern and take on WordPress

Businesses are already using a whole bunch of Google products on their websites — AdWords, Google Maps, Analytics, etc… — so why not offer them a proper CMS too?

Textpattern would serve this purpose wonderfully.