The direction of Textpattern 5

jstubbs · 2012-11-04 12:27:10

Destry wrote:

Okay. But taking the quiet road out isn’t exactly smart PR, because obviously people are confused. I didn’t even know Sam wasn’t a dev anymore (but I haven’t really been looking either). There are a lot of references to a so-called “Textpattern 5” and “TXP 5” around the properties.

I would suggest a dev blog post at .com that explains what has just been said here, to put it on “official” public record, because page 35 of a meandering forum thread is not exactly communicating with the customer base. I would also add an “Update” to Stef’s dev blog post where he announced “TXP 5” so that anyone who lands there is immediately clued/redirected to the current state of affairs. Lastly, we all need to scour the properties and remove references to “Textpattern 5” or they just keep confusing the situation.

Content and customers are just as important to think about as code and UIs. It’s the whole experience.

Ed.: I would even say close this thread with a redirect to the blog post, as soon as it’s written.

Yes to all of that.

Last edited by jstubbs (2012-11-04 12:29:17)

philwareham · 2012-11-04 12:50:50

I’ve started writing a .com blog on this subject, I’ll let Robert/Gocom/Stef add their input to it and then post.

trenc · 2012-11-04 13:23:52

I have to agree with Destry.

The thingy with the »TXP5-Spark/Plug cancelling« plugin developer should had heard earlier (damn english, is this the correct tense?).

But I love the direction Textpattern is going. With every version it makes more fun to play with.

johnstephens · 2012-11-04 13:25:45

Destry wrote:

I would suggest a dev blog post at .com that explains what has just been said here… I would also add an “Update” to Stef’s dev blog post where he announced “TXP 5” so that anyone who lands there is immediately clued/redirected to the current state of affairs. […] I would even say close this thread with a redirect to the blog post, as soon as it’s written.

+1

Thank you, Jukka and Robert for clearing this up! I also didn’t know that Sam left the development team, nor was I aware that Jeff Soo left the dev team until I just checked here. Not seeing their names on any recent commits to TXP core suggests that they haven’t been involved, but that might not be the only way developers contribute.

wet · 2012-11-05 07:19:56

etc wrote:

but is not processing XML with XSL more natural than retrieving data with SQL and wrapping it in tags?

Though I have not researched any exact data on this issue this is what I think:

XSLT is of course a more natural fit to retrieve datasets from XML than wrapping rows your retrieved from a SQL database into XML envelopes.

But you’ve got to store your data first to have something to query about later, i.e. you need a persistence layer to accompany your data retrieval method. If you want to store your data as native XML you have (at least) two choices:

Store your data into a plain flat XML file on the server’s file system
Use an XML database as a replacement for our current persistence layer MySQL

For option #1 you will probably run into performance problems as soon as the amount of data rows exceeds a rather small number.

Imagine a site with a few thousand comments. Every new comment would either cause the rewrite of one large XML file which serves as a container for all comments (this would make querying for subsets of articles rather trivial), or adds another small XML file which contains just this newly added comment (in the latter case you’d have to concatenate all these files into one large XML document whenever you wanted to execute a query for a certain subset of comments).

Hosting providers tune their file systems for read operations. Write operations are slow.

You cannot assume that a whole dataset fits into main memory on a shared hosting provider with a meagre 64 or 96 MB PHP memory limit..

For option #2 you will have to find a commonly available XML database system which will care about all the dirty details like performance, caching, query optimization and many other things we have accustomed to like in our current persistence layer (MySQL) if you want Textpattern to run on the usual LAMP stack and not vanish into a niche market with specific hosting requirements.

This is a rare animal.

etc · 2012-11-05 12:39:56

These are important points, of course, that’s why my post was very conditional. Clearly, nobody would seriously suggest to store all data in plain XML files, I meant option 2. But a tighter XML integration could be beneficial, everyone seems to agree with that. MySQL has some kind of XML support, though I have no experience with it.

One can imagine that nested XML-structured comments for each article are stored in a new textpattern table field. Retrieving comments for one article is than a trivial task, but tags like <txp:recent_comments /> could become expensive. You will probably also loose <txp:comment_message /> and such tags in favor of XSLT. Is this good or bad thing, are xsl: tags harder to learn than txp:? Would other “tree” structures (like categories) better fit in XML format? Could even TXP pseudo-XML forms be parsed with PHP XML extensions? I have no established opinion, really, but since we are on TXP5 thread, why not imagine different possibilities?

And thank you for the reply, not exactly being a programmer, I easily overlook crucial points.

mrdale · 2012-11-05 22:08:04

wet wrote: This is the sad truth: I had to look up “thug”, “jab”, and “insidious” to fully grok this thread. “Swine” and “red neck” were already part of my vocabulary.

Har. That insidious jab made me laugh, you clever swine. ;) This red-neck thug says thanks.

AdamK · 2012-11-12 19:26:44

I have a question not so TXP specific, more a general question to the web developers million times more experienced than me:

Why not PostgreSQL

and, in consequence

what about Amazon’s database solutions, DB in the cloud etc.?

A.

TheEric · 2012-11-14 04:55:09

shaking head My. What I’ve missed…

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#349 2012-11-04 12:27:10

Re: The direction of Textpattern 5

#350 2012-11-04 12:50:50

Re: The direction of Textpattern 5

#351 2012-11-04 13:23:52

Re: The direction of Textpattern 5

#352 2012-11-04 13:25:45

Re: The direction of Textpattern 5

#353 2012-11-05 07:19:56

Re: The direction of Textpattern 5

#354 2012-11-05 12:39:56

Re: The direction of Textpattern 5

#355 2012-11-05 22:08:04

Re: The direction of Textpattern 5

#356 2012-11-12 19:26:44

Re: The direction of Textpattern 5

#357 2012-11-14 04:55:09

Re: The direction of Textpattern 5

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