Textpattern Support Forum

Good work all.

Personally – I like “Txp: Just Write”. Great little tag line. Developers should be smart enough to see why that’s good for their clients.

And, with no intention of hi-jacking the work or the thread, but as a bit of comic relief among all this serious discussion, in the spirit and idea that having fun together is good for the team, may I suggest the reverse of “Reasons To Try”? ;)

“Reasons Not To Try Texptattern”

1. I prefer to pay for my software
2. I’m personal friends with Matt Mullenweg
3. I miss Dean . . .
4. I’ll roll my own CMS
5. I want frequent upgrades
6. Your Turn!

Hey – if we want to show our sense of humor, we could even include it on the website ;-P LOL

Mike

Last edited by maverick (2008-09-09 17:43:30)

nemoorange – looks great. Black and white looks good too :).

First, I liked the Reasons not to try Textpattern by maverick.

About Dave’s proposal.
I liked it! Well done!

About the look and feel:
It’s an attractive “texty”/CSS-based design: it honors the text on textpattern.
However, it also looks like a newspaper site, and so, imho, it makes Textpattern look like a blog/news tool, and not a CMS that can fit many other purposes.

About the carousel:
I liked the images chosen to illustrate each feature on the carousel. I think they illustrate pretty well each feature listed.
Maybe, the text/box accompanying the images could be colorful, so it has some contrast over the image.

I’ve seen the carousel images are background images, and that may be right, because they coud be seen as decorative images, and may not be considered meaningful content.
As an idea, this decorative images may alternate/cycle (maybe using some js/jquery magic) with an screenshot of Textpattern admin (related to the current item on the carousel).
If this idea of cycling (fade-in/fade-out) a decorative background-image with a real TxP screenshot (an <img /> on the dom) isn’t very appealing or doable (i think it is), then I would go with the screenshots and not the decorative images.
IMHO, screenshots on the home page are a selling point. Then, the decorative images (again, all of them are very nice and fit very well each idea) could be used somewhere on inner pages.

About the content:
I know Dave have followed the previously wireframe/content suggested on this thread.
I think the homepage still lacks a little of content.
I would like to see another row of three boxes, including some of the content that’s already on Textpattern.com.
Particularly:

• add some of the items under Interface features
• add some of the itmes under Publishing features
• and… the latest posts on dev’s blog? some supported languages? some featured plugin? any of the things suggested by Gocom on above post?

Finally, some details to take in account for future versions:

• highlight some content with <strong>
• it would be good if the carousel degrades gracefully. I would suggest to use jQuery serialScroll, which is a nice approach to scrolling elements on a page, and it’s easily degradable to a overflowed box with scrollbars.

Gocom wrote:

What i would want to find, but it is hard to spot them:

• Link to installation instructions: Me wants to know if it is easy or pain in the ass.
• More sightful link to FAQs.
• One click link to the changelog: As a developer i want to see if it is dead or not from a respective of code.
• System requirements, and what it does. What is it. It is CMS but where it goes. On my PC or does runs it on perl?

Also missing:

• it isn’t stated that TxP is an open source gpl’d software.

Nice contrib, Dave! Initiative needed. We could spend too many months redoing wireframes to appeal to everyone’s opinions and desires. It should prove more effective in this case to see a little spit-shine too. That’s why I went straight to mockups before. :)

My two cents:

1. Not favorable of Georgia only (and in any case does not follow the humble style guidelines already set forth in wet’s wiki for font styles). Ed. My bad. Looking at the image in 100% mode, I see it works just fine. :) I like it.
2. Too many lines, looks like one of those prison suits from a 30’s comic. If you eliminated every a few horizontal lines, which is unnecessary for understanding anything, you gain something cleaner that’s just as effective. Ed. Maybe just need to remove the full-width lines from between sections to get rid of the double-line effect which does seem a bit too much.
3. The reason I wrote “Hemingway used Moleskine®,” is two fold: First, it’s mentioned in “The history of a legendary notebook” that accompanies every Moleskine bought. Second, there’s a thriving community of Moleskine enthusiasts today, just like yesteryear, and most of these people are highly talented artisan, designer, writer types. All-in-all, I think using the nod to Moleskine has a bigger impact than not. (And it rolls better off the tongue.)
4. I would still like to see another clever way of integrating the different systems so they are not just menu links (that’s fundamental), but also tie-in the subtools and/or menus of each system (wiki, forum, plugins…). The WordPress family of sites does this beautifully. I demonstrated it with my wiki and forum mockups. There’s got to be other takes on it that are clean and user-oriented?

Matthieu, I hope you’re reading and don’t feel put off by the hard critiques from round 1. It’s all good. I for one am expecting to see round 2 from you. (Same goes to arzhou and Dave!)

By the way, all. I’ve skinned a local copy of MW with my initial wiki mocks (link above). I have a few tweaks to make and will then put it to a public demo. I’m using the markup and CSS mods for my local wiki (with minor visual tweaks), so it’s not a loss for me either way; however, outside of the masthead/global nav it should work now for whatever design is finalized because it follows the guidelines as they exist (after changing header font family).

Speaking of style guide, regular text might be something softer than just black, which is well-published to be hard on the eyes when read on white backgrounds. I used #4f4f4f in my mockups and wiki which seems to tame the contrast pretty good before actually appearing gray. Just a thought.

Last edited by Destry (2008-09-10 09:29:23)

Bloke wrote:

A splash of colour in the carousel. Either colour the text box to make the text stand out a bit or maybe pick out just one colour (á la Sin City) from the background pics (whatever they may end up as) and emphasise that slightly. Perhaps yellow if there is any…?

I was going to say I really like the black and white images (though not sure that’s a good idea for actual demos…could be though), but the Sin City thing makes sense and could be sweet! I like the idea of a touch of yellow, or maybe something sepia. That’s all you would need, a single color to accent the images a bit.

EDIT: Dave, with regard to font-family, maybe you could throw up two more clones of your page and make all three linkable in the main nav: One of the additionals would have Georgia headers and sans-serif text. The other having opposite. From that we might be able to really compare and decide what’s the best way to go with font-family while keeping everything else constant. Just a thought.

Last edited by Destry (2008-09-10 09:50:54)