When I started blogging again, I picked Textpattern as the CMS that would run Stoneship. Looking back, this has proven to be a big mistake—simply put, Textpattern sucks. Its interface is far from intuitive, it’s buggy, it’s slow, and doesn’t work well with lighttpd (which is one reason why I never had comments enabled).
I ditched Textpattern and replaced it with nanoc, a tiny homegrown CMS written in Ruby. One extremely cool property of nanoc is that it doesn’t run on the server, but rather on a local computer. I write Stoneship’s pages and articles on my Mac, and then tell nanoc to process the local content and upload it to my server.
nanoc’s advantages, in a nutshell:
- I can now put my site in a Subversion repository.
- I can now preview all changes before I upload them.
- I can now write my posts in Markdown instead of Textile or HTML.
- I can now properly use TextMate to manage my entire site.
- Stoneship is now served lightning fast.
nanoc doesn’t just output static HTML. It can output anything—including Ruby or PHP code. Therefore, the probability of having comments enabled has actually increased. :)
I’m still unsure whether to release nanoc or not. It’s a sweet little tool, and I think other people will want to use it, but I simply don’t want to deal with documentation, bug reports, feature requests, testing, etc.
Kudos to Wim Vanderschelden, whose idea I totally stole.