Textpattern Support Forum

OK, I’ll address some of those concerns where I can – although I realise by stating this all in the forum I’m probably speaking to converted anyway, but see point 6:

1. Textpattern development is definitely not winding down, in fact in the first 7 months of this year to date there have been more SVN commits than the whole of 2011 and 2010 combined. As for new features, here is the currently incomplete history of what version 4.5 will bring, in a few weeks time.
2. There will be new features added on an ongoing basis, regardless of whether the next version is called v4.6, v5 or whatever, with what we hope to be a reduced time between new releases (but still keeping to a sensible release schedule, not spamming releases out constantly). I myself have a large roadmap of features that I’ll be working on for Textpattern v4.6 and beyond – I can’t discuss those just yet but rest assured that I’ll be looking at better solutions to how Textpattern handles its image library as part of that.
3. Robert has already stated that we’ll be looking at improved custom fields as part of v4.6.
4. Contributions in the form of patches are welcome – a case in point being Gocom’s excellent new multi-edit feature, rolled into SVN a week or so back.
5. I’ve been connecting with a number of respected and influential industry people who use, or have used, Textpattern and drumming up their interest and support on Twitter for the new version and onwards.
6. The Textpattern.com website and it’s siblings will be getting an overhaul once 4.5 is out. It’s going to take time, but it will happen. Everybody needs to keep in mind that Textpattern is not run as a business – unlike WordPress and Expression Engine – it’s a group of developers who believe in the CMS and work on it pretty much as an unpaid labour of love in their spare time. The content changes to .com will focus it much better as a portal to the project, and regular announcements, blogs and general related news will be easier and more interesting to create, and for users to discover and share. Superfluous content will be moved to the appropriate sibling site (FAQs for a start) or cut if they don’t give any real worth.
7. I’ll be planning on doing some introductory videos for .com site too – in fact I started creating one last weekend as a tester. If anyone wants to get involved in helping make those videos, then all the better.

Any other info, roadmaps and Textpattern 5 details, are not my place to say.

philwareham wrote:

7. I’ll be planning on doing some introductory videos for .com site too – in fact I started creating one last weekend as a tester. If anyone wants to get involved in helping make those videos, then all the better.

That sounds good.

What about an official YouTube channel? Textpattern is taken (and wasted), unfortunately, but TextpatternCMS is available.

That would not only make a place for core videos, but it would allow an easy means for making playlists of other Txp videos in YT, and there’s a lot of them to cull through.

Would also make a nice platform for handling Txp video competitions? :)

agritsogap wrote:

I was uninformed/misinformed.

Rose, where do you usually look for this kind of information? I don’t think we ever can make as much signal (or noise) as the WordPress community but how for instance do you track other vendors in that space?

My very first Textpattern site was a photoblog using James Muspratt’s widescreen template and plugins such as bot_image_upload to make the workflow better.