Frequently Asked Questions

Why another Weblog Software?

There might be any number of blogging systems out there, but the only full featured blogging systems are WordPress, Movable Type, serendipity and probably Typo which is a newcomer too. So in fact the competition is not that big. If we reduce it to programming languages we have PHP with WordPress, Perl with MovableType? and Ruby with Typo. TextPress will probably be the first full featured, standalone blog system in Python.

Also our design goals are different. We want to have a powerful core where you can add functionality using plugins. The core also is written with security in mind, we have classes and functions that help us avoid CSRF and other attacks without having to think much about it.

Why not a Framework?

Why is TextPress not written using django, or TurboGears, or pylons. Well, why should it? The main reason why people use frameworks is that they want to write fewer code. We do that too. As bridge to WSGI we use Werkzeug, SQLAlchemy for the database related stuff, Jinja for templating and with TextPress 0.2 babel for the internationalization.

If we plan to write our application in say, TurboGears we would bind ourself to exactly that framework. Django users would have to install the whole TurboGears package with all of it's dependencies. And even if all that would be installed, some of the magic of TurboGears would make it very hard to integrate it then into django. The other way round it's not much better. Also, what happens when TurboGears2 comes out and it's running on top of pylons? Rewrite your application and the plugins?

Why the Name?

It's a very bad word play on "WordPress", which is arguably the best blog software so far. We might change that name before release, but for the moment it's just TextPress.