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Re: How did WordPress win? (against Movable Type)
hcgtv wrote:
On 9/26/2010, I wrote an email to the mailing list entitled The Blogging Software Dilemma. That email drew 28 responses, more traffic to the mailing list than all of 2010 combined. The thread hit a nerve, with many people offering their time and custom mods to the core if Textpattern was on a source repository that was more conducive to outside developers.
Sorry I missed it. I just dug through my gmail to find it and read the entire thing. So picking through here, people are looking for:
1) Better handling of themes/templates
2) Localized Textile
3) Visual Semantic Editor
4) Decent management and insertion of media into article
5) Item management (aka I don’t want to have to remember by heart the URL of each and everyone of my thousands article or rewrite it all by hand when I change URL scheme)
6) UI “UI is tired and oldskool and difficult to navigate”
7) Revision system
8) Humane update
9) Comment system is rudimentary
10) Plugins are hard to find, and hard to assess the quality of
11) No integration with external services or sites.
12) Templates are stored in the database
So, doing a bit of editing, I think it can be reduced down to 5. I left out 2 because to me that is kind of a separate issue. 11 is much the same way – the lack of 3rd party support stems from the size of the userbase.
1) A Revised UI
2) A Themes Engine and External Template Support
3) Post Editor which includes Media Management
4) Automated Updates including identifying plugin support
5) Improved Plugin Directory
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My personal take:
1) I actually run the stock UI. I have looked through all the plugins and haven’t found one that really appealed to me. But I always thought the WordPress backend was pretty ugly until 3.0. It made a lot of strides in the last year
2) No one can question the fact that WordPress has been very successful in developing a community of themes developers in a way unmatched by another cms. This is certainly something that would help. Whether they are external files or stored in the database I think is pretty irrelevant as long as there is some way to edit them. And personally, I would rather edit a well-written Textpattern theme than many of the WordPress themes I have looked at.
3) Something else that WordPress didn’t do very well for a long time but the media management stuff there is pretty good now.
4) One-Click Updates is nice. I am surprised that one mentioned creating the config.php. Having WordPress create the wp-config.php automatically is certainly a plug for them.
5) Not being able to find the plugin you are looking for is very disheartening or finding it is incompatible with your versions of the cms happens no matter which one you choose. But I do think the directory could use some improvement. Although this is almost a separate issue.
As far as googlecode vs github vs bitbucket, I used to dutifuly checkout the old svn version in the old days. I haven’t really tried the new stuff except github, for which the default windows client is pretty much unusable. But I need to spend more time exploring before I really comment on that.
And I guess I need to spend some time with Escher, too.
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Re: How did WordPress win? (against Movable Type)
Bloke wrote:
I didn’t realise I’d whinged that much :-) Perhaps I’ll back off with the posts then, if that’s the impression I’m giving: maybe I should keep quiet so it can’t come back to haunt me in future?
Stef, to tell you the truth, I think you’re doing your best. Look at the size of your post, the time you take to explain things, this hasn’t happened in the past here. Whatever steam we blow off, it’s because of what has transpired over the years. There were many people willing to give of their time that are gone now, it’s a long list, the momentum we had 5 years ago is a distant memory. No matter what the future holds with TXP5, you’ve got to admit that some long time community members, that still take the time to post on the forum, are skeptical. So besides a new code base, a rebuilding of the community is in order, or else who’s going to go out and trumpet your hard work.
Leadership: fine in principle. Find me some people in the community willing to give up their day job to the cause.
Just ask.
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