Textpattern Support Forum

Els wrote:, in this thread

Useful discussion, nice ideas, but I find it a lot of attention for a new user who moves away from Txp to another CMS after one day, and to yet another one the next day…

Yes, but the attention was not directed just at that one visitor. It’s a good spur to talk about Textpattern’s “brand” in general. In terms of bringing in new users, Txp has a good reputation as a mature, secure niche product. But we have a lousy sales pitch. The purely visual branding of the websites is one aspect, and we’re all glad to hear it’s being addressed. Perhaps we’ll get some fresh energy into TextBook and beginner tutorials.

An issue I haven’t seen discussed lately is the installation process. Easy enough when you already know the drill, but playing around with screencasting I did a couple of new installs and tried to look at it from the newcomer’s perspective. There are a few seemingly small points that could be cleaned up to make the process feel much easier and more certain for newbies:

• The “That went well” screen no longer has a message telling you to delete /textpattern/setup. Older Txp versions made this very clear.
• Logging in for the very first time doesn’t work. You have to log out and log in again. (I did, anyway.) If this is a known issue, could we at least add a message to that first login screen?
• I think there should also be some clear direction to go straight to Diagnostics to address any errors there.

Other CMSs I have played with recently make this a clear step-by-step process: change this file permission now, delete that directory now, etc.

I have also been thinking about the default installation. Again, something experienced users don’t give a thought to. But for a new user this is an important part of learning Txp, and what the default installation offers is not very helpful. On the home page:

• The article permlink looks like an ordinary header: black text, no underline, border, or background. Not even a different color on mouseover.
• The external links in the right sidebar look very much like the internal links on the left.
• There are four significant internal links showing: Home (two links), article permlink, articles section, about section. Clicking the permlink brings up a view that is nearly identical to the home page. The about section is empty. The articles section brings up yet another view of the same article we’ve seen on two other screens. This feels like going in circles. It is a wasted opportunity to teach.

My suggestions are to clean up the installation process, as noted above and if feasible, and to redo /textpattern/setup/txpsql.php to bring in the data for populating the content and presentation tables from an external file. Then other authors could easily contribute new installation themes. Offer a choice of templates at the end of the installation process, including a completely blank slate. I’d be happy to have a go at submitting a patch for this, noting that I would need a bit of hand-holding as to the correct procedure (I’ve never dealt with svn, for one), if the devs think it a reasonable idea.