Textpattern Support Forum

NOTE: This is not the MLP support thread, you can find that here.

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Hi TXP community,

As you may know by now, Steve (netcarver), one of the developers behind the MLP (The Multi-Lingual Publishing Pack) pack, said goodbye to TXP.

Users of netcarver’s plugins were concerned about the future of those plugins. Indeed, after netcarver leaving the forum, two of his popular plugins (the MLP and sed_section_fields) were broken on TXP 4.0.8.
Thankfully, wet helped to fix sed_section_fields, and Graeme helped to fix the MLP :)

In the meantime, we began to wonder how to keep MLP development going on, how to avoid MLP becoming abandonware. We were worried because we, our clients and many other TXP users are MLP users, so the MLP is an important tool for us.
We thought about contacting some well-known plug-in developers to ask for advice and, in fact, we did.

When Graeme posted the fix for MLP to be compatible with TXP 4.0.8, we decided to contact him for more advice, and share with him our concerns and ideas about the future of the MLP.

That’s when the future became brighter, because Graeme showed himself willing to help us and to help in further development of MLP. That was and is great news! :D
And there is more… Graeme contacted another well-known developer and asked him to join us in this new MLP era. And he is willing to help too :D

So, here we are now: trying to materialize all these wishes, ideas and words into actions.
And we would like other members of this community to join us in this effort of bringing MLP on track again and make it a true community plugin.

The plan

Graeme shared some good ideas about how MLP development could be improved.
He pointed out that the current forum thread for MLP (1200+ posts) is becoming difficult to follow for users and to follow up for developers. Bug reports, feature requests, helping posts and power tips are being buried in that large thread.
So Graeme suggested a public issue tracker could be used to file bug reports and feature requests made on the plug-in thread. Also, the plan is to have a new homepage for MLP, to help promoting the plugin, and to have a running demo of MLP.

What do we have so far?

• two developers willing to contribute to MLP’s continued existence: Graeme Porteous (graeme) and Stef Dawson (Bloke)
• TXP Forge, using Redmine for project management, issue tracking and whatever else is needed (both domain and application vigorously taken care of by Graeme)
• Graeme is writing a developer guide to how the plugin works

What more do we want?

• We are inviting other plugin developers to join the MLP dev team. If you are a plugin developer, you may like to make your plugin compatible with the MLP, or you may want to develop a new feature for the MLP, or you may want to get involved to learn and help. If you are a plugin developer actually using MLP yourself, your contributions would be especially welcome!
• Donations to the project will always be welcomed. We still need to work out a way to organize this.

We will post more detailed info on when and how to use the issue tracker en when to use the forum thread and things like that soon – when we’ve worked it out ourselves ;)

In the meantime, we’d love to hear your opinions!

- only one of us could post, but the ‘we’ in this post are Julián (maniqui) and me (Els) :) –

Last edited by Els (2010-10-17 11:00:16)