In this article, we shall attempt to compare TextPattern and WordPress and see which one emerges victorious.

Before proceeding further, a short disclaimer: the division of this comparative review under multiple headings does not essentially have a logical explanation – I’ve simply attempted to compare it using four basic, but very important, categories, functionality and usability, mode of operation, extensions and plugins and finally, community and support.

Furthermore, I guess many users of WP and TXP will either agree or disagree with my views. To be honest, using a particular CMS also requires a certain amount of personal choice, what might work for me, may not work for you, and vice-versa. Differences in opinion are always welcome!

So without further ado, let us begin with our comparison.

Functionality and Usability

When it comes to functionality and usability, WordPress seems to win easily. While this does not mean that TextPattern is, in any way, less functional than WordPress, WP simply beats TXP in terms of ease of use! With the advent of version 3.x and higher, WP now boasts of a super organized administrative panel that lets you manage your website with ease. Don’t believe me? Take a look at WP’s admin panel. ‘Dashboard’, ‘Posts’, ‘Pages’, ‘Settings’ – which of these sections are not self-explanatory? Customizing the blog becomes a matter of few clicks. Take a look at the ‘Settings’ page of both the CMSes.

WordPress Settings Page

On the other hand, TextPattern’s administrative panel, though equally capable and powerful, seems ‘outdated’ in comparison to that of WordPress. Of course, TXP is equally robust in its admin panel, but overall the interface is not as easy to use and may even be confusing for beginners.

TextPattern Settings Page

Availability of Custom Plugins/Extensions and Themes

Apart from ease of use, the next thing that defines any piece of software is the availability of extensions for it. However, more often than not, there is a spiral between ‘ease of use’ on one hand and ‘extendability’ on the other. For instance, when it comes to mobile operating systems, Android is more popular than Samsung Bada. While this does not demerit Samsung Bada itself, Android’s popularity can be attributed to its ever-growing app market, which in turn is increasing because developers take an interest in it due to its easy extendability and wide usage, which ensures their efforts will not go unnoticed. Again, due to developers’ keen interest, the apps keep growing, and the users keep coming to Android.

Both WP and TXP support themes and templates as well as multiple plugins and extensions. However, WP has more themes and plugins then TXP. While this may or may not prove WP’s superiority, it surely plays its role in contributing to WP’s user base. Since many commercially viable tech blogs and websites are powered by WordPress (not to mention the millions of blogs at WordPress.com and Blog.com), it is but natural that WP has a large number of themes and plugins. Certain providers, such as WooThemes, offer themes for both WP and TXP. Yet, in this case too, WP dominates TXP in terms of the number of available themes.

If you have exemplary coding skills, fret not! You can easily tweak TXP and design your blog or website the way you wish to. But if you are an end user just looking to get a blog or website up and ready with as little technical expertise as possible, WP should be your safest bet!

Mode of Operation

Modus Operandi is by far the most debatable topic when it comes to comparing any two CMS’s, let alone WP and/or TXP.

To begin with, WordPress comes with a WYSIWYG Editor that makes editing posts and articles extremely simple.

WYSIWYG Editor in WP

TextPattern, on the other hand, has an equally awesome (though not so end-user friendly, as it takes some ‘getting used to’) editor, which can do almost anything you want it to, but will surely leave many beginners confused. In TXP, Textile and other related features can either be your best friends or your worst enemies.

Article Editor in TXP

In the admin back end as well, you will notice that mundane tasks such as updating the CMS, installing themes/plugins, or even navigating the back end – all seem easier on WP rather than TXP for a novice. However, the confusion vanishes once you get accustomed to the interface.

Community and Support

A CMS is only as good as its user base. Both TXP and WP have a good and fairly active community and many forums where you can seek support and advice.

In terms of documentation, TXP seems to win outright. WP is well documented, but it comes nowhere close to beating TXP – apart from the usual website, TXP also has its own User Documentation Website and another TXP Resources site.

Speaking of support, WP is updated on a more frequent basis as compared to TXP. However, this can be interpreted either way – supporters of WP will consider the frequent updates as higher level of activity at their developers’ end, while supporters of TXP can attribute the lesser updates to a sign of maturity of TXP in itself.

To sum it up

Before coming to a conclusion, let us recap each CMS’s pros and cons:

TextPattern:

Pros:

• Textile is a wonderful component, and if you get used to it, you will never, ever, miss WP.
• You can tweak your website as much as you want. There is negligible encapsulation done.
• Extensive documentation.

Cons:

• Admin back end looks outdated.
• Interface confusing for beginners.
• Lesser number of themes/plugins (as compared to WP)

WordPress:

Pros:

• Perhaps the easiest CMS ever
• Several themes/plugins
• Excellent update mechanism

Cons:

• WP is intended to power only one blog at a time (unless you’re using WPMU)
• With plugins/extensions, it may becomes bloated
• Editing article meta data is difficult
• Notorious for frequent security bugs and issues

And the Winner is…

As I stated above, using (or not using) a particular CMS is a matter of personal preference too. More often than not, our choice for a CMS is governed by our needs (and, perhaps, bias towards a personal favorite).

WordPress and TextPattern are both great at what they do! If you need a CMS just to power a blog or a small website, look no further than WordPress. If, on the contrary, you wish to run multiple blogs, or prefer to tweak your articles before posting them (or simply like to do things the geeks’ way), TextPattern might be your ideal solution. In simple terms, TXP should be chosen if you wish to define the dynamics of your website just as if you were ‘programming’ software.

Have you used WP and/or TXP earlier? Do share your experiences with us in the comments!

If you haven’t already I strongly you suggest to read the first post -
How To Create Popular Blog With Keyword Research, Heatmaps And SEO? from series to get little starting overview.

In that case you’ll get good search rankings because of SEO and trackbacks,comments you’ll get if article will be really good. ( of course, don’t forget about PageRank – new blogs usually don’t rank very well in Google). I must also mention, how good is to establish community, who actively discuss article in comments – Google just love content, which updates regularly. In short – people who add comments to article actually update and continue your article, plus each comment is taken as article update – very important aspect!

Okay, I got a little bit away from main article discussion – this time as promised I am featuring free keyword research tools, which are the most popular now.

Note, at the end of article you’ll find also several non-SEO tools, but still which can be used seriously to optimize your site, help to choose right keywords and understand niche you are optimizing your site to! I suggest you at least visit all of these sites, so you pick your favorite tool because really all tools differentiate a little bit from each other.

Enjoy this article and remember there are several more series to come soon, where I will try to explain how I do my SEO as well as link you to several more useful resources and articles you really should read!

1.Google search based keyword tool

The Search-based Keyword Tool provides keyword ideas:

• Based on actual Google search queries;
• Matched to specific pages of your website with your ad and search share;
• New to your Adwords account (typically excluding keywords matching those already in your account).

I thought it will be better to add official product introduction, than explaining what this tool does with my words to give you good overview.

2.Google AdWords: Keyword Tool

Use the Keyword Tool to get new keyword ideas. Select an option below to enter a few descriptive words or phrases, or type in your website’s URL. This tool gives you approximate keyword search volume statistics for Google search network and because of Google growing and dominating search network, you really can get pretty precise results.

3.Google Insights for Search

Google Insights is a powerful tool that offers features not available on most other free tools. For seasonal or fluctuating niches, you can view stats by year or a specific time period. For regional niches, you can view stats by country, state or even city. The graphical reports are great for seeing trends. One of the only downsides is that they don’t show absolute search volume but instead normalized data that is shown on a scale up to 100. Also since the data is normalized the detailed stats are limited.

4. Google Trends

Use commas to compare multiple search terms – one more great product from Google allowing you to research and compare trends.

5.Free Keyword Suggestion Tool from Wordtracker

Wordtracker helps website owners and search engine marketers identify keywords and phrases that are relevant to their or their client’s business and most likely to be used as queries by search engine visitors.

Use the free keyword suggestion tool from Wordtracker to help your website rank higher in the search engines. This tool can generate up to 100 related keyword phrases and show daily searches.

If you use Internet Explorer 7, or Firefox 2 or 3, you can add the Wordtracker Keywords search to your browser.

6.SEO Book Keyword suggestion tool

This tool is powered by Wordtracker, get comprehensive overview about different search volume statistics for Google, Yahoo!, MSN daily estimonials – export whole list to Excel *.csv file for later research!

Top Paying AdSense Keyword Lists

Also good introduction to this tool – definitely suggest you to watch this video.

7.Good Keywords v3

Free and downloadable Windows software helping you to get out more of Google keyword research, worth checking out!

8.SEMRush

What you may do there:

• Discover competitors’ sites with common Google keywords;
• Get list of Google keywords for any site;
• Get list of AdWords keywords for any site;
• Check your competitors landing-pages for SE and AdWords traffic;
• Investigate long-tail keywords for any domain;
• Get estimated SE and AdWords traffic for any domain;
• See sites’ spending for AdWords;
• Get hidden related (and low-cost) keywords to optimize your AdWords campaign;
• Find potential advertisers for any site;
• Find potential traffic sellers for your site.

9. Free Search Term Suggestion Tool

Trellian KeywordDiscovery keyword data is compiled and collected from a number of search engines to provide a far more accurate cross section of searches performed world wide. This tool can generate maximum 100 keywords and collect search term data from over 200 search engines world wide.

10.KGen

KGen (Keyword Generator) is Firefox extension that allows you to see what keywords are strong on visited web pages. This plugin retrieves every words of a page and lets you know how many time they appears on her and their weight in the page (a word in the title of a page has a stronger weight than a word in a paragraph).

11.Wordpot Free Keyword Tool

Try this free keyword research tool,which is quite usable, but creators limit your access trying to sell you paid version, generally you still can get pretty good overview.

12.NicheBot Classic

Type a keyword or keyword phrase and get the top 50 most popular keyword listings.

Non-SEO tools, but still extremely useful:

13.Synonyms Thesaurus with Antonyms & Definitions

Synonym.com is good web resource for English synonyms, antonyms, and definitions. Type in a word and the synonym finder will come up with a list of synonyms. Check out the most popular online synonym searches to find the right word for any occasion. Use the antonym tool to find find antonyms and check out the definitions feature to read the definition.

14.Thesaurus

Thesaurus.com is produced by Dictionary.com, LLC, a leading provider of language reference products and services on the Internet.

To use the thesaurus, simply type a word in the gold search box and click the ‘Search’ button. A list of synonyms and antonyms will be returned.

15.Delicious

Bookmarking service, but still very useful for searching keywords. I usually find similar popular articles or websites and check which tags are used to bookmark that page. Extremely useful!

16.Dictionary

Dictionary.com is a multi-source dictionary search service produced by Dictionary.com, LLC, a leading provider of language reference products and services on the Internet. Dictionary.com is hiring, please find information about career opportunities.

To use the dictionary, simply type a word in the blue search box that appears at the top of every page and then click the ‘Search’ button.

17.Wikipedia

Everybody knows wikipedia, but did you ever think about using it to research your niche – related categories, language people in your niche are using? Useful to visit from time to time in research purpose!

18.Keyword questions

People often type questions into search engines. Now you can find these questions, answer them and get some great search traffic. You’ll be targeting long tail keywords and providing content that readers want to read and link to. Also try the keyword tool the professional SEO uses. Enter a single or a short keyword to find the questions people are asking in your market.

19.Twitter Search

Keeping up with interesting news and people you care about is one dimension of Twitter, but what if you need to find out what’s happening in the world beyond your personal timeline?

There is an undeniable need to search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through our service.

20.MetaGlossary

MetaGlossary is able to precisely extract the meanings of terms and phrases from the often frustratingly unmanageable mass of information on the web. It provides you with concise, direct explanations for terms and phrases, not just endless links to sift through in search of a comprehensive definition.

Series  coming up:

Introduction – How To Create Popular Blog With Keyword Research, Heatmaps And SEO?

1. Free Keyword Research Tools – Comprehensive Insight (done)
2. How I do keyword research – Behind the Scenes Overview
3. Why And How Heatmaps Improve Your Blog?
4. How To Optimize Images For Search Engines?
5. Above The Fold – What Every Web-Designer Should know?
6. Readers Participating: Keyword Research Experience And More SEO Tips

Organize Your Screen and Columns

I will start explaining the most important features

1. Tweet

This is the most basic button, You probably use very often – here You can write status update as well as insert and shorten URL.

Also note there are also buttons where You can add picture, translate message, automatically shrink message (shorten words as possible) and automatically hash tag with most relevant and popular tags. Keep playing with buttons – you’ll get used to it pretty fast.

2. All Friends

Open Friend tweet section column, usually it is open on default.

3. Replies

Open Reply column (lists all replies to your messages), usually this one is opened too. All messages with @yourtwittername included will be there.

4. Direct Messages

Open direct messages column (DM), opened on default.

5. Favorites

Opens Favorite message column.

6. Groups

Start new group, choose group members and manage them. This can be very handy to create specific column following just your selected friends, you want to take off the crowd. For example you can create one column – just where You talk with You work buddies and then maybe one more column where you select just your school friends. Read more about group creation here.

7. Twitter Search

Use advanced search to search all relevant tweets into a new column – great way yo start conversation that You really take interest in. Very powerful tool, read more about it here.

8. TwitScoop

Adds new column showing You hot trends, most often and popular topics – see what people are buzzing about.

9. 12Seconds

12seconds is the best place online for video status updates. It’s a super easy way to share what you’re doing with your friends and family using short video clips. You can use your web cam or mobile phone. Show your friends where you are, share your thoughts, or tell them how you’re doing. We are building a video status platform that will help you keep up to date with your friends 12 seconds at a time.

Tweetdeck just add interaction with this project and service.

10. StockTwits

StockTwits is an open, community-powered idea and information service for investments. Users can eavesdrop on traders and investors, or contribute to the conversation and build their reputation as savvy market wizards. The service takes financial related data – using Twitter as the content production platform – and structures it by stock, user, reputation, etc.

Log into the site with your Twitter details and you will be presented with a user interface filled with comments and stats showing the top ticker buzz, the top StockTwit talkers, and the top gainers and losers.

Tweetdeck just add interaction with this great service.

11. Facebook Status Update

Same here, adds Facebook interaction with Tweetdeck.

Okay, now we are a little more familiar with main navigation section. Continuing article, I’ll explain many short tips, which will help you navigate and use TweetDeck more effectively saving Your time in big amounts, of course, if you want it to spend at all on Twitter.

Reply, Retweet, Direct Message

Just rollover on profile icon to get many options as reply, retweet, DM, follow,unfollow, add to group, favorite, search. With those buttons you can do anything you could need from another person in very handy way.

Organize Your columns

You can get 5 columns on Your TweetDeck if You choose Narrow columns. Also note if You click on the new buttons to open new columns, you should close some of already opened ones in order to see new ones or just scroll from left to right.

How to delete column

Filter by keyword

Now this one is extremely useful because for example, if you are searching for links to retweet you can type “http” and all messages with URL’s will be listed.

Also “RT @” is useful, because you filter messages, which your friends seemed to be worthy for retweeting.

One more – if you’re looking for questions to answer and help somebody just type question mark – “?” or “please” and you’ll get all questions or requests from your friends.

You can also filter by username – select dropdown list and write Your friend’s username and get only his tweets in one column. You can even select time frame and source – it gives you complete control to Your columns.

Twitter API Limit

This is really good feature – Twitter API Limit Tracker. The API Tracker allows you to see how much of your Twitter API limit you’ve used and at what time your API limit will reset to 100%. You can see this limit on top right of Tweetdeck. On TweetDeck settings you can choose how you use this limit selecting how often Your columns updates, this is nice feature also if you have got a lot of followers. By limiting updates, you have enough time to read all interesting tweets in time.

TweetDeck Color Settings

As for me it’s pretty tiresome to read on dark background light letters and you know what – you can easily change it if you want! I just reversed colors and played some little more and got light, personalized TweetDeck profile. If you want, you can also share your Tweet color settings with friends or reset colors if you messed up something.

Okay, this ir pretty rough list explaining just the most important Tweetdeck features, if you want to dig really deep I listed several more resources, you can continue reading:

All your TweetDeck Questions Answered – 31 basic questions answered here, consider reading if You’re new to Tweetdeck.

TwitterHowTo

Here You can find a lot of Tweetdeck tips explained with screenshots really detailed, site is dedicated to help You with Twitter, but Tweetdeck related articles explaining new features are pretty often there. Just keep searching, what You need.

TweetDeck’s posterous

-All things about TweetDeck and Twitter.

It seems obvious, but if you’re interested what’s happening with Tweetdeck, read their own blog. That’s all for short!

I also use several FireFox add-ons, so I don’t have to type and go to statistic related webpage to get the results, results actually came to me in this way, allowing me comfortably browse, explore and compare sites I visit. Now I am so used to live with these toolbars, I can’t imagine my browsing life without them.  And just a thought – can You imagine how useful in marketing is information about Your competitors?? I just love Internet world :). Okay, now let’s get to the actual article.

I will start with actual FireFox plugins I use and later in order to the most popular and know traffic tracking sites. If You want to get a full list of SEO related Firefox plugins check out my other article – Popular Firefox Extensions for SEO masters.

1. SearchStatus

I couldn’t live without this useful plugin, which tracks Alexa, Compete ranking and Google LivePageRank. If You didn’t know Alexa and Compete sites are the most popular and trustworthy sites letting You track statistic about sites worldwide, compare them and so on. And who aren’t heard about popular Google ranking system, however if You don’t, check out Google official blog to find out more.

And yes, Alexa and Compete has it’s own Top and rating system, so that’s the number meaning, maybe I was silly, but I didn’t realize that at first, so I am pointing it out for You too.

You can download this add-on here.

2. Compete Toolbar + Compete Site

This site is very similar to Alexa, offering alternative or even better some really good site to compare ratings so You have more objective information. I use Compete always together with Alexa, however in compete my site is ranked much higher, so I think Alexa rating is more objective..or I don’t know, I am just critical against myself.

And they offer also toolbar, it is second add-on I use regularly, it’s official Compete.com site toolbar, tracking also average people count visiting site. Maybe this information is not so precise, but when I compare those stats with my site, I can get actual overview, how many people are visiting other sites too – pretty great. There are many other features in this toolbar however, but I am not using them in my workflow however, but You can do Your own research, maybe some feature is useful for You.

You can download this add-on here.

3. Google Analytics

Yes, this is the best statistic site available I think and the most popular one too. Google Analytics tracks information from Your site so detailed, You can spend hours comparing and analyzing Your website stats. I am sure everybody are using Analytics service by now, however if You don’t use it – You should go to their site and take video tour, explaining You everything much better than I could.

4. Alexa

I mentioned this site before, but now detailed overview Alexa provides a wide range of statistics based on popularity rank, reach, speed and in-links. You can compare site statistics also up to 3 sites. And information is precise, because everybody participate in it with help of Alexa Toolbar. When You install Alexa toolbar You get very useful tool and also give Alexa back just by visiting pages and using toolbar. I really like this system, check out maybe You’ll find it useful too.

Get Alexa Toolbar here / Visit Homepage

5. Quarkbase

I heard from this site at the first from Nick from ResourcePile, and since then I always been using it.

Quarkbase is a free tool to find complete information about a website. It is a mashup of over 30 data sources and many algorithms gathering information from Internet on various topics like social popularity, traffic, associated people, etc. – and yes, really complete starting from digg, delicious, reddit links, technorati ratings until RSS readers, traffic stats. Just type in – website url and enjoy huge information amount in seconds!

6. QuantCast

QuantCast is powerful statistic gathering website with information to help web publishers understand clearly their audience, what sites they like after visiting Yours, very powerful. Also if you want to get precise information about Your site, You can become QuantCast Publisher and  add simple code snippet in Your website, to let quantcast track and show You detailed statistics.

7. StatsAholic

If You are looking for simple and fast statistic, You should visit Statsaholic site, where fellows over there offer data and graphs, which are generously provided by Compete and Quantcast. Enter up to 3 domain names and compare.

8. PopUri.us

Also one simple and great site, just type in website address and get Google pagerank, alexa, compete, quantcast rank, technorati links, yahoo backlinks and more.

9. Website Grader

“Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.”

Every information piece about site is very useful giving You several SEO related advices, domain age, expiration, Google indexed pages, traffic rank, last google crawl date, also You can compare Your site with others and so on. Very useful, must know site.

10. BuySellAds

Maybe some people will laugh, I added this site too, since it’s not generally related to statistic information gathering, but I see from my site details Est.Impressions are very precise there. And now many people use this service, so You can just click to Advertise Here button and see precise results of that site monthly unique visitors and also alexa, compete rank, Google pagerank, delicious bookmarks and so on.  I just love that little thing about unique visitors.

You can see my account details by clicking on the link as an example.

I could continue, but I thought for statistics with these sites should be already more than enough. Enjoy the list to help You in marketing, SEO or just to satisfy Your curiosity about other site statistics.