Things needed for textpattern to be considered a (powerful?) CMS

Ericki · 2019-12-07 04:38:56

Hi

I am a brazilian textpattern user, and i met this cms a few months ago and since then i have been testing after testing. I really liked the simplicity and ease of use, creating themes and so on. But, something makes me think that should have more advanced resources, after all, it is already an old cms and evolution is what is always expected in these cases.

But it seems that the textpattern has stopped in time, leaving out essential resources, and it really is what makes me say goodbye to the textpattern.

But, because I created a great affection for this cms, I will list some features that would make me use textpattern again in the future, if they were added.

1. Possibility to add multiple categories in articles. (more than two)
2. Improving the text editor is essential, you cannot paste images, for example. Considering that website publishers are not always a developer, this is meaningless.
3. The link generated for the articles is based on the title, however it is generated without dashes in place of the spaces. He just sticks it all together. This needs to be resolved, nobody deserves to waste time putting dashes in the link.
4. It’s OK that the textpattern community is not big, which disadvantages the creation of plugins. However, something makes me think that there should still be more plugins available, even if created by the textpattern team itself, after all, it would encourage others to create too, and generate interest around cms.
For example: Broken Link Checker, something for SEO, contact forms, integrations with great services like Google Analytics, Google Adsense, Google AMP, etc.

Anyway, there are a multitude of things missing for textpattern to become very usable by inexperienced developers and users. But it sure has potential for that, just hope for future BIG updates. Thanks for listening

Last edited by Ericki (2019-12-07 04:42:27)

towndock · 2019-12-07 07:46:14

Your #1 and #3 are easy to quickly answer.
- 1 Unlimited categories can be done with plug-in rss_unlimited_categories. It allows you to select as many as you wish for each article. You can download it at this link.
- 3 This is simply an admin preference. Under admin > preferences > publish
change “Permalink title URL pattern” to Hyphenated (title-like-this)

Textpattern is a powerful CMS, and it does it with elegant simplicity.

Last edited by towndock (2019-12-07 11:29:37)

Bloke · 2019-12-07 09:40:30

Ericki wrote #320389:

after all, it is already an old cms and evolution is what is always expected in these cases.

It’s the same age as WordPress, so I hope you mean mature :)

But it seems that the textpattern has stopped in time, leaving out essential resources

Not seen you on the forum until a couple of days ago. We’re a friendly bunch. Instead of scratching your head or wondering, you could have popped your head in and we’ll help you out.

Possibility to add multiple categories in articles. (more than two)

It’s planned. In the meantime, as has been said, there are plugins for unlimited categories or tagging available.

Improving the text editor is essential, you cannot paste images, for example.

You mean drag and drop images into the flow of your article body where the cursor is? Or attach images to it directly so you can use the power of its templates to build galleries? There are numerous ways to treat images and numerous image handling plugins available to suit, such as abc_image, abl_droploader, smd_imagery, etc, all with very slightly different workflows to help you manage images from the Write panel.

If we know what you’re trying to achieve we can help you do it in the most efficient manner.

more plugins available

There are hundreds. We’re just in the process of redoing our central plugin repository site that will help to expose them to everybody in a more efficient manner. If you want a specific plugin building, drop in the relevant plugin forum and ask.

People usually use webmaster tools (or equivalent) to check links. What would you expect such a plugin to do? Trawl your articles from the admin-side and test each link, giving a report? Spider your site from the public side? Does it test images too? And files? If you define the scope of what you want to achieve, someone could help you come up with a suitable solution.

“Something for SEO” is a little vague too. We have the description fields at the Section, Category and Article level, and there are plugins like rah_metas to help out.

Contact forms: we have com_connect, which can do so much more than just contact (e.g. there are extensions for it to accept file uploads, link to MailChimp, add ReCaptcha, etc).

As for integration with Google services, what do you want to see? Most people just add the JavaScript analytics link to their pages and then use the Google dashboards to analyse traffic. Are you expecting a plugin to replicate that functionality inside the CMS?

Thank you for your feedback. Textpattern is incredibly flexible and powerful as towndock points out. We’ve had people run everything from simple blogs to entire monolithic sites with thousands of articles, images and links. If there’s anything you’re not sure it can do, please ask in the forum and someone will always help out.

etc · 2019-12-07 09:47:27

Thanks for testing and feedback, appreciated. To complete,

#2 is regularly discussed on the forum. I agree a decent WYSIWYG editor would make editing easier for most users, but none I’ve tried is flexible enough to be compatible with all txp features. Plugins exist, though.
#4 most people rather call these (twenty years old) services ‘tracking’ nowadays, but it’s ok writing a plugin for it. We (me) just don’t use them and thus need to know what you mean by ‘integration’.

Destry · 2019-12-07 18:17:48

Two sides to every coin. Same as ever.

+1 for no tracking integration. ;)

Ericki · 2019-12-08 02:58:30

Maybe it seemed like I was criticizing the power of cms, but that was not my intention. Actually, I liked a lot of things that I saw, but my intention with posting in the forum was to expose some weird things in cms in my opinion. Of course, using plugins available for textpattern, or even creating them, is possible to get anywhere. However, these are simple things that no developer should waste time on. Also, not always who uses content managers is necessarily a developer.

As for the plugins I mentioned, to be specific, I can give an example of wordpress itself: ‘Yoast SEO’. It is an integrated SEO solution for WordPress, with page content parsing, XML sitemaps, post parsing, and more. In the end, while Wordpress had giant plugins to make it easier for many people, it seems Textpattern only had plugins to fix problems that shouldn’t even be there.

Anyway, I support Textpattern a lot, and I will be continuously present to see the next updates. Apologies and Thank you for your responses.

Last edited by Ericki (2019-12-08 03:01:12)

colak · 2019-12-08 06:21:49

Ericki wrote #320402:

Maybe it seemed like I was criticizing the power of cms, but that was not my intention. Actually, I liked a lot of things that I saw, but my intention with posting in the forum was to expose some weird things in cms in my opinion. Of course, using plugins available for textpattern, or even creating them, is possible to get anywhere. However, these are simple things that no developer should waste time on. Also, not always who uses content managers is necessarily a developer.

As for the plugins I mentioned, to be specific, I can give an example of wordpress itself: ‘Yoast SEO’. It is an integrated SEO solution for WordPress, with page content parsing, XML sitemaps, post parsing, and more. In the end, while Wordpress had giant plugins to make it easier for many people, it seems Textpattern only had plugins to fix problems that shouldn’t even be there.

Anyway, I support Textpattern a lot, and I will be continuously present to see the next updates. Apologies and Thank you for your responses.

Hi Ericki, welcome to txp, and thanks for your support and input

WP can indeed seem easier for te end user but not to the designers who need to learn php and the ins and outs of WP.

Txp is geared for designers, replacing php with an easy to understand xml type structure for its pages. This means that if the designer plans and constructs the site well, it will eventually be easy for the end user too.

Re SEO, txp’s flexibility, makes it much better than WP where most of their users rely on plugins. SEO relies on mostly meta tags which are very easy to add. Re the sitemap, there is a plugin, which is no longer needed as we can now construct our own sitemaps using core tags. Check out how I am doing it for one of my sites. I do not use categories but they are easy to add.

The idea of txp was never to bloat it with functionalities but to make it into a secure, stable, backward compatible, and flexible CMS. This means that our updates seldom break any sites.

etc · 2019-12-08 10:39:26

Ericki wrote #320402:

Maybe it seemed like I was criticizing the power of cms, but that was not my intention.

There would be nothing wrong with this, we don’t take critics bad.

Of course, using plugins available for textpattern, or even creating them, is possible to get anywhere. However, these are simple things that no developer should waste time on. Also, not always who uses content managers is necessarily a developer.

I agree, you #1 is a limitation that we are going to remove in future releases. The rest is either configurable or yields no clear consensus among txp users. In no way this means we ignore your or others opinion, just trying to outdraw the situation.

As for the plugins I mentioned, to be specific, I can give an example of wordpress itself: ‘Yoast SEO’. It is an integrated SEO solution for WordPress, with page content parsing, XML sitemaps, post parsing, and more. In the end, while Wordpress had giant plugins to make it easier for many people, it seems Textpattern only had plugins to fix problems that shouldn’t even be there.

Thanks for the reference, will take a look. I think most txp plugins are rather tools than ready-to-use solutions (a rod rather than a fish, you know), but we have some biggies too.

Anyway, I support Textpattern a lot, and I will be continuously present to see the next updates. Apologies and Thank you for your responses.

No worries, you are welcome any time, thanks for the feedback!

jakob · 2019-12-08 13:14:04

etc wrote #320405:

a rod rather than a fish …

I like that. That’s exactly how I see Textpattern and what I really cherish about it.

michaelkpate · 2019-12-09 14:00:02

Ericki wrote #320389:

But it seems that the textpattern has stopped in time, leaving out essential resources, and it really is what makes me say goodbye to the textpattern.

I read this the other day but decided to think about my comment for a couple of days.

1. Possibility to add multiple categories in articles. (more than two)

A lot of the core design decisions still stem from what Dean needed for his own site. And he didn’t need more than two categories.

But since the whole Folksonomy thing took off I think needing more than two categories is a pretty special instance.

Remember the purpose of sorting your content efficiently is to help users find it. By the nature of how top categories should be setup, you shouldn’t be able to classify one post into multiple top-level categories. For example, if your blog has three categories “Advertising, Marketing, and SEO”. Your posts often tend to fall into multiple categories. Perhaps you need an umbrella category for all three? Maybe they should all fall under Business? Or you can have one category called Advertising & Marketing. Then have SEO as a sub-category for those. – Categories vs Tags – SEO Best Practices for Sorting your Content

2. Improving the text editor is essential, you cannot paste images, for example. Considering that website publishers are not always a developer, this is meaningless.

I’ve talk before about Gutenberg, WordPress’s fancy new but controversial new Block Editor. The thing is, I don’t know that it can really do anything that you couldn’t do with a combination of Textile and Override Form.

It would be cool to upload images directly from the Write Tab natively but if you are working on a complex post it really isn’t that big a deal to upload the images in advance.

3. The link generated for the articles is based on the title, however it is generated without dashes in place of the spaces. He just sticks it all together. This needs to be resolved, nobody deserves to waste time putting dashes in the link.

Already covered.

4. It’s OK that the textpattern community is not big, which disadvantages the creation of plugins. However, something makes me think that there should still be more plugins available, even if created by the textpattern team itself, after all, it would encourage others to create too, and generate interest around cms.

There will always be a debate (see Gutenberg above) over what should or should not be a core feature in every cms. Most WordPress plugins are aimed at making major changes in the backend to add features that you can just do by editing the site html but would probably have trouble finding.

I’ve used WordPress off and on over the years. There are definitely some things it does better but I wouldn’t really describe it as more powerful, just more complex.

colak · 2019-12-10 09:50:23

etc wrote #320405:

a rod rather than a fish …

jakob wrote #320407:

I like that. That’s exactly how I see Textpattern and what I really cherish about it.

This is indeed a great description. I am mostly thinking of txp providing the eggs rather than the omelet, allowing you to prepare the recipe you want.

Summer · 2019-12-10 13:52:22

I think the full WYSIWYG is still needed. Although there are related plug-ins, the functions are not complete.
I have been following the progress of textpattern.
对于使用中文的普通用户，使用Textile编辑文章比较困难。

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#1 2019-12-07 04:38:56