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#1 2012-07-13 15:05:58

Destry
Member
From: Haut-Rhin
Registered: 2004-08-04
Posts: 4,909
Website

[mention] A little question gets a lot of feedback

Observations from this brief exchange…

  1. What is making Rose think there’s no Txp direction? (Maybe suggests there are gaps in news delivery; perhaps over-reliance on the forum to deliver news to the world—deja vu.)
  2. Case in point: she says the Txp support system is great, but seems to be missing information like custom fields getting a boost in v4.6. Whatever the cause, the result is that Txp is losing people from info gaps, one way or the other.
  3. What is making Rose think the project is losing support? (Is it? And if so, how to address it?)
  4. I can’t comment about the photoblog complaint, but if there’s improvement towards that in Txp, it’s news that should be made clear to the public and pushed out.
  5. What is the future of Txp 5? How did she seem to think it’s just a tweak-fest?

This should be taken as a shot over the ship’s bow… to address some of the concerns/misconceptions expressed by this person, because she’s probably not the only one. And maybe step up outward noise about key evolutions that forum dwellers take for granted (e.g., knowledge of custom fields in 4.6). Maybe more regular developer blog articles, or more use of the Textpattern G+ page for the routine little stuff. It’s easy to link to and provides great conversation tools for a wider audience. Twitter was clearly not the right medium for her reply, for example…

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#2 2012-07-13 17:20:58

philwareham
Core designer
From: Haslemere, Surrey, UK
Registered: 2009-06-11
Posts: 3,564
Website GitHub Mastodon

Re: [mention] A little question gets a lot of feedback

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.

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#3 2012-07-13 18:28:39

Bloke
Developer
From: Leeds, UK
Registered: 2006-01-29
Posts: 11,243
Website GitHub

Re: [mention] A little question gets a lot of feedback

Yes, we need to be better at this. Communication, that is. In the current IA, the .com blog seems the wrong place to put “We just added xyz to the core, watch out for it in the next release” type propaganda, but some things have gone in there recently.

The other social channels would probably be a better place for that kind of thing, as it broadens the discussion, albeit being limited to small one-liners, or linking to a full-featured .com post from G+.

Facebook is used for polls and random mentions at the moment. If people would benefit from “we can haz been working on this” thing being chucked on the various channels — and Rose seems to indicate it would — then we should make a point of increasing the chatter.

P.S. for anyone who thinks we’re “just tweaking”, please check out the nightly builds. The amount of graft gone into realigning the markup on the admin side for Hive’s entrance, the removal of lots of crufty old presentational tables, the new Sections panel, the move towards a more responsive AJAX methodology for some of the panels… it’s all helping leap the platform forward for themers and plugin authors. And there’s much more to come.

Last edited by Bloke (2012-07-13 18:38:20)


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#4 2012-07-13 18:38:11

Destry
Member
From: Haut-Rhin
Registered: 2004-08-04
Posts: 4,909
Website

Re: [mention] A little question gets a lot of feedback

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? :)

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#5 2012-07-13 19:37:33

agritsogap
Member
From: Houston TX
Registered: 2011-11-25
Posts: 11

Re: [mention] A little question gets a lot of feedback

Hey! This is Rose….

Ok, I was not expecting this to be addressed as it was, but given that it was shows once again the amazing community support of developers here.

I want to thank you for clarifying many misconceptions that I had. Although, as of right now, I’m still going to work with WP. Strictly for the reason that it has more potential at this moment than the current version of TXP. Once TXP starts releasing new versions, this will probably change (because the difference between php and the tag system y’all use is basically like the difference between walking to hell on legos and the land of fluffy bunnies and rainbows).

One main point that I have – Phil pointed out that TXP is not run as a business. This may be true and I understand the reasoning behind this decision. But honestly, as a developer, I need the reliability of a business run CMS. Y’all are eventually going to end up in the same boat as EE was in when they announced that EE2 was coming out and then it didn’t actually come out until an entire year later where they lost a lot of support and customers because EE kept saying “It’s coming, it’s coming” but it wasn’t available. This issue is very prominent though throughout the marketing system. Good example – Diablo 3 (video game) was announced by Blizzard and then several years later it was actually released. Bad marketing.

Although, this issue I believe is what Phil was addressing when he said “with what we hope to be a reduced time between new releases”. This is good.

I completely agree that TXP’s communication to the developers world could use some revamping. I am a good example of why this is the case… I was uninformed/misinformed.

Anyways, all of this is good news. And thank y’all for addressing it.

I will keep my eyes peeled towards any new development of TXP.

Rose

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#6 2012-07-14 08:00:46

wet
Developer Emeritus
From: Schoerfling, Austria
Registered: 2005-06-06
Posts: 3,320
Website Mastodon

Re: [mention] A little question gets a lot of feedback

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?

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#7 2012-08-17 18:34:23

NyteOwl
Member
From: Nova Scotia, Canada
Registered: 2005-09-24
Posts: 539

Re: [mention] A little question gets a lot of feedback

Photoblog? Textpattern is a publishing system. The day it becomes a blogging platform with as sloppy a codebase as WP (IMHO) I’ll be looking for a new application.


Obsolescence is just a lack of imagination. / 36-bits Forever! / #include <disclaimer.h>;

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#8 2012-08-17 19:10:05

MattD
Plugin Author
From: Monterey, California
Registered: 2008-03-21
Posts: 1,254
Website

Re: [mention] A little question gets a lot of feedback

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.


My Plugins

Piwik Dashboard, Google Analytics Dashboard, Minibar, Article Image Colorpicker, Admin Datepicker, Admin Google Map, Admin Colorpicker

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