Moving from Textpattern to Wordpress

Until recently, my website SanskritVoice was using Textpattern as the CMS. But now, I'm moving to Wordpress. Read below to know why and how.

I liked Textpattern for several reasons. I can have multiple Sections like Home, About, Articles, and Resources. Each section can have an assigned template, and I can publish blog-posts for a specific section. Under a given section, I can further classify my posts based on category.

The main drawback with Textpattern is the difficulty in moving the website to a different server. It has weak import/export features, and less support for unicode. It lacks a WYSIWYG editor, no widgets, and has relatively less number of plugins.

On the other hand, Wordpress has a huge community, excellent feature-set, and myriad plugins for almost anything. However, Wordpress lacks the concept of a section. It only has Pages, Posts, Categories and Tags. Ofcourse, I can assign an appropriate template to a page. I spent some time in reading the Wordpress docs on how to use it as a traditional CMS. I had to use custom-templates and custom-variables to match the URLs of textpattern and to create pseudo-sections.

Here is an overview of what I did. A traditional Page in Wordpress is static. So, I created a custom template (say "Featured Page" template) that displays the content of the Page, and reads a custom field "categoryid" defined on that Page. The template then displays all posts that were published under that category. Thus, I projected a Page that contain posts from a specific category as a virtual Section.