Textpattern Support Forum

So is 4.05 going to be a maintenance release, or are there going to be specific additions?

A roadmap?
I prefer surprises!

alexandra wrote:

If you (zem & mary) don´t like to listen and take other people ideas into account, nothing will happen/change. By the end zem and you will be the last 2 txp users. That would be very frustrating, wouldn´t it?

I don’t think zem & mary deserve that…
In the last month, zem & mary have listened lot of complains about TxP and the way they handle the development process. I agree with nardo: I have confidence in TxP Team.

BTW, count me as the 3rd last TXP user.

Open ID? robust comment spam? tags?
The Web is simplier.
We should keep standing on the shoulder of giants.

(mmm, me again writing and making non-sense stuff… but after reading this thread, I feel I’m not alone… about writing and making non-sense at all)

Thanks for the blog post, Mary. It should help clear things up for people.

Hopefully the new book will bring some new developer interest to Txp, thus speeding things up a bit.

I think it’s important to note what Textpattern has going for it:

• Security. Since the release of 4.0.4, how many “OMG HAX0RZ WILL KEEL U” security releases has WordPress had? At least three that I can think of, and I’m not even thinking that hard. TextPattern? Zero.
• Stability. I kind of like not feeling pressure to upgrade the foundation of a website every four months, thank you very much.
• Speed. In my experience, Textpattern is typically faster at rendering pages than the competition. Caching plugins make it faster still.
• Flexibility. Things that are hard in systems like WordPress are easy in Txp. The template system is somewhat complex, but very powerful. Plugins abound.
• Community. This is one of the most helpful CMS forums I’ve participated in. Active and well-organized, too.

And what is it missing?

• A roadmap to soothe the doubters. I understand why this isn’t practical, but it could have a beneficial effect on community morale. Even a general “we’re shooting for these features in the next release” would help, and we’re already seeing those statements for crockery.
• A release treadmill. No big loss there.
• Pingback and trackback support. Sorry, but this is important for the bloggers out there. Trackback support is available, but only as a two-year-old hack with German documentation.
• Simple navigation handling. The built-in tags got better at this in 4.0.4, and more improvements are probably underway for 4.0.5. With nested sections and unlimited categories in 4.1.x, we’ll have to see this stuff dramatically overhauled. I’m very curious to see how that comes out. Meanwhile, some plugins are filling the void.

Those are my thoughts. I’m working on my PHP chops, and will probably be investigating the pingback/trackback issue if nobody else gets to it first.

A lot of people have expectations of free (as in speech) software that are based on their experiences of commercial software. I don’t think that’s the case with Drew, though. He seems willing to contribute if he knew what direction he should work toward. I doubt he has the time and energy to manage a fork, however.

What I would like to know is whether those who complain are mac or pc users…

Well, I’m a PC user. I’m not sure the expectations for Web software are necessarily the same as those for desktop software.

One thing people should keep in mind is that no one CMS is perfect for everything. Some things are possible with Drupal that I’d never try to attempt with Txp. If you’re only making a straight-up weblog, WordPress is great. And so on. If Textpattern tries to be all things to all people, it runs the risk of being nothing to nobody.

Last edited by Logoleptic (2007-05-16 17:32:09)