The
Palm
Civet

my favorite quick-and-easy cms got its first substantial upgrade in about a year. some of the new features include a more integrated admin skinning system, plugin development improvements, and a couple new template tags.

for the average ‘can you make me a website that i can manage myself’ project, textpattern has been my tool of choice for a while now due to its simplicity, flexibility, and its delicious xml-like templating tags. on the other hand, i find editing a site’s forms and pages from a textarea within a browser to be annoying, even embarrassing, and it had me considering abandoning textpattern altogether.

that’s where cnk_versioning came into my life, which is a textpattern plugin that passes your database-stored templates out to files and back, so you can edit them with the text editor of your choice. as noted on the forum post, this isn’t the safest of ideas for a production website, but it really speeds up local development time.