Installation and setup of Textpattern was nice and easy.

Kind of cheated here though. I installed it through Softaculous.

The only hiccup was when I ran the Diagnostics I got this message under Pre-flight check:
“The following PHP functions (which may be necessary to run Textpattern) are disabled on your server: proc_nice”
But after a quick search I found out that this is not needed by Textpattern 4.0.x releases. so this can be ignored.

The user interface is reasonably easy to get used to.

Textpattern uses the Textile markup language to convert plain text to valid XHTML rather than a WYSIWYG editor. The upside of this is, once learnt the speed of writing is much faster.

Using images.
This to me was very counter intuitive. I uploaded the image easily but when I linked it in my post it didn’t show up. First I checked my link to it and it was correct. After rooting around a bit I found out that Textpattern had removed my image name and changed it to a number for some, maybe very valid reason.

But that is the beauty of Textpattern is that someone has written a plugin for this.
That is what makes it so fast and configurable. You get the basics enough to make it work and then you can customise it any way you need with plugins.

Look and Feel.
The same philosophy works here. Straight out of the box it is really ugly and clunky looking. But there is help at hand. Head down towards TextGarden where there of downloadable “front-of-site” and “administration” themes designed by other users of this, what I’m beginning to think of as a little gem of a CMS