Textpattern vs. WordPress

Matthew 6:24 says:

No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both…

For over a year now I’ve been bouncing back and forth between WordPress and Textpattern as my preferred publishing platform for weblogs.

Actually, it really can’t be described as going “back and forth.” I’ve been using WordPress while dreaming of Textpattern.

See, WordPress is full of features, and everything about it is easy to use. Publishing a blog entry is easy and the online editor makes simple HTML formatting easy too; changing the theme of your site is as easy as adding a new folder to the themes directory and then clicking a button in the admin interface; adding a plugin follows the same procedure in the plugin directory. There’s even a plugin that integrates the Textile markup language into the WordPress editing interface. Textile is one of Textpattern’s biggest selling points! So why am I torn between WordPress and Textile if WordPress makes all of these things so easy?

The answer is execution speed. Or maybe — the more fundamental reason behind the difference in execution speed — design.