My Journey to Finding the Perfect Accessible CMS: Textpattern
Gary Hartzell
CompTIA Security+ Certified Sr. Security Analyst and Team Lead with 15+ years of experience in cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Web Development.
Navigating the world of content management systems (CMS) can be overwhelming. Which CMS should you use? Developers spend a lot of time testing different options, especially when researching plugins and themes necessary to achieve the desired features.
Let's add an extra layer of uncertainty and difficulty to this process: accessibility. I am a blind website creator, and I have spent years trying to find the perfect CMS that meets my needs and is accessible enough for me to use independently. Don't get me wrong; no matter what platform I use, I will always need a sighted person to confirm that the color scheme and layout are visually appealing. However, I wanted to design the core of my sites without too much frustration.
Two of the most popular CMS platforms, WordPress and Drupal, come close, but ultimately rely too much on WYSIWYG editors for many tasks. While I initially enjoyed using both, I inevitably encountered too many visual roadblocks. I'm not trying to criticize either CMS. In fact, WordPress is my third-ranked accessible CMS, and Drupal is second.
What is number one, then? Hands down, the most accessible CMS for blind developers is Textpattern. Textpattern has been around for a long time, and I was surprised (and saddened) that I had never come across it before 2022. It is actively developed and maintained, with a robust plugin system, themes, extensive documentation, and a great online community.
So, what about accessibility? If you have ever written any HTML, you'll feel right at home with Textpattern. It is written in PHP, and you make your site come to life using traditional HTML markup tags combined with Textpattern-specific tags. No WYSIWYG. No drag and drop. Just good old-fashioned HTML markup, supercharged.
One of the standout features of Textpattern is its extensibility through plugins. These plugins can add additional tags, enhancing functionality without compromising the simplicity of the core system. This means you can extend your site’s capabilities while still working within an accessible and familiar framework.
When I started using Textpattern two years ago, I did run into a couple of minor display issues, such as seeing which plugins were active vs. inactive. I reported these small display issues to the developers via the community forums, and I am delighted to report that these issues were fixed in the upcoming release (4.9.0).
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While no CMS is perfect, if you need an accessible yet powerful alternative to WordPress, look no further. Even if you don't have any accessibility requirements, but you are looking for a new CMS for your next project, I strongly recommend Textpattern and encourage you to check it out. By the way, Textpattern is open source, and I know the developers welcome contributions, whether it is reporting bugs, writing plugins, or, as I have started to do myself, patching older plugins to be PHP 8 compatible.
Here are the links: