I set this blog up late in 2007, on the back of reading the fantastic Textpattern Solutions book. I had rolled my own blog for some time but wanted to move towards something more robust and loved how Textpattern was focused on web standards and had a clear separation between content and presentation.

In the last five years Textpattern has been a loyal companion, hosting my sporadic blog posts and performing admirably on the few occasions where I’ve had traffic spikes. However lately we’ve grown apart. I used to use Textpattern a lot but increasingly found it needed considerable hacking to do anything more than serve simple content.

Increasingly I’ve felt the need to try something new for the blog.
I now mostly work with ExpressionEngine for content management but this would be overkill for my personal site. I’ve been interested in the potential offered by file-based CMSs – especially for version control – and have seen Bastiaan’s excellent Kirby blossom since it was released into the wild in 2009. However work took over and I put migrating to a new system on the back-burner.

Then last year my interest was piqued when I saw that Jack McDade had started his own, file-based CMS called Statamic. I’ve been a big fan of Jack’s work on the ExpressionEngine Structure add-on so thought I would give Statamic a go. The main issue I had was getting all the content over from the current Textpattern CMS into a format that Statamic would like.

So, inspired by a tweet by Andrew Travers I dusted off my PHP-fu and set about building a wee tool to do the work for me. What I need is folk to test it – so up on Github is the codebase to export a set of files from Textpattern suitable for use in Statamic. Download it, fork it, refine it but please let me know how you get on.

Repository is at https://github.com/cole007/textpattern-statamic

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