Tales from the front line: an very-old-to-new Textpattern upgrade

gaekwad · 2020-02-21 16:17:33

Occasionally I undertake old Textpattern to new Textpattern upgrades. I’m actively working on one today. Sadly it’s a somewhat familiar story of a web developer installing old Textpattern (4.3-era), installing MANY plugins to achieve what they want, and then losing interest and wandering away. For the most part, I switch on Debug reporting on a test server, navigate around and pick the plugins to update first from the debug text. In this case, there are around 30 plugins, and I’m not even convinced a third of them are actually used in the code. I’ve upgraded and enabled about 6 so far and things are mostly working OK. More work to do, clearly, but dang.

This site has 45k comments over 1k articles. I estimate 90% of the comments are spam, because an old plugin seems to have bypassed the Textpattern spam check and bots have taken over. That’s a tedious job to remove comments from the database in batches.

Also, it’s interesting how much 2010-era web stuff has as good as gone: I was reminded of FeedBurner today. Nostalgia, huh?

The ~~worst~~ best part — and this is the take away I will offer anyone listening, in lieu of payment for listening to this venting — if you’re going from a very old Textpattern that’s been compromised by the spam bots, and each of the many-thousand spam comments has an IP address in it, your initial login to the 4.7 or newer Textpattern will take a very long time because each of the comments has to be processed to strip out the IP address (privacy issues). I had to extend to the PHP processing time to unlimited on my server because it kept bombing out with ugly timeout messages. It took 25 minutes to process the comments overall. Ouch.

End of vent. Thanks for reading.

Bloke · 2020-02-21 16:46:32

Ah the old upgrade heave-ho. I’ve done it too, though not as often as you by the sounds of things.

The slowdown as it processes the IPs is a concern. I wonder if there’s anything we can do in 4.8.1 to address that? I know it’s a corner case, but anything we can do to improve the upgrade experience is a plus. I’m sure there are many instances of Txp out there still running 4.4- or 4.5-era code because it just works. Until a PHP upgrade means it doesn’t.

gaekwad · 2020-02-21 17:20:06

Bloke wrote #321838:

The slowdown as it processes the IPs is a concern.

I’ve got a corpus of ~48k comments in a SQL query if you want to have some real fun…

Bloke · 2020-02-21 17:32:17

gaekwad wrote #321839:

I’ve got a corpus of ~48k comments in a SQL query if you want to have some real fun…

That was my next question: did you capture it so we can run some benchmarks if we get a chance to do this in a more batch-friendly way? Thanks!

gaekwad · 2020-02-21 17:41:44

Bloke wrote #321840:

did you capture it so we can run some benchmarks if we get a chance to do this in a more batch-friendly way?

Yep – I’ll drop you a line directly.

bici · 2020-02-22 01:20:08

does anyone allow comments on their website these days?

colak · 2020-02-22 05:50:57

bici wrote #321847:

does anyone allow comments on their website these days?

I saw sites that do. I guess that it depends.

colak · 2020-02-22 05:57:58

bici wrote #321847:

does anyone allow comments on their website these days?

I saw sites that do. I guess that it depends.

phiw13 · 2020-02-22 06:34:54

@gaekwad

48k ? ouch… I am no candidate to take over on that one.

bici wrote #321847:

does anyone allow comments on their website these days?

I do on a personal site, and do it for some friends site. Multiple sites I visit do.

It is possible that you don’t see the comments, though. Many content-blockers/ad-blockers have a section about blocking comments, and a number of widely used platforms have their comments hidden when enabled – *.blogspot, Typepad and many WP sites for example, or Disqus (that is an absolute blessing).

WebmistressM · 2020-02-23 19:42:08

Oh boy…totally have been here and done that with some old sites I created in version 4.3. I have actually wanted to do more projects of bringing TextPattern sites that are pre 4.5 into 4.7.x or the upcoming version 4.8. I do think that with TextPattern, it is common to find abandoned pages and projects. I would like to think with some of the improvements (including the display of resources and docs) would help with retention.

gaekwad · 2020-02-23 20:03:11

WebmistressM wrote #321855:

I do think that with TextPattern, it is common to find abandoned pages and projects.

I’ve been around Textpattern since 2005, and I’ve seen personnel and policy changes along the way as the project has evolved. The biggest single difference now compared to 5, 10 and 15 years ago is the balance between features in core and plugins. It was commonplace to deploy Textpattern with a lot of plugins to achieve certain functions. Now, the plugin ecosystem appears to be much quieter…whether this is a side effect of developers moving on, giving up or stopping caring…I don’t know.

I hope a key factor is the evolutionary changes made in core that have brought things along so there’s a much lower requirement for plugins.

The web has changed over the last 5, 10 and 15 years, too. Sometimes I miss the old web. Sometimes I wonder if I use Textpattern because it reminds me of the old web…the effort people put in, the care that went into design, and content that was worth spending time on (writing and reading). The old web might be pushed into the shadows these days, but I’m still a cheerleader for it.

(I still don’t make enough of my own damn websites with Textpattern.)

jakob · 2020-02-23 21:06:18

I hope a key factor is the evolutionary changes made in core that have brought things along so there’s a much lower requirement for plugins.

I’d agree with you there: I’ve also updated a lot of older sites and the core can really do a lot of the things for which many smaller plugins were needed in the (distant) past. That really is evolutionary improvement. It perhaps also has to do with the level at which Textpattern’s tags work.

And then, as you say, people have moved on. It’s the larger plugins that added whole new functionality that are lacking most. We also have some real champion plugin authors here who over the years have quite large collections of plugins. The flip side of being so prolific is the effort required to maintain them to keep them up to date. GitHub makes it a bit easier for others to chip in with improvements/issues but not everyone is on that.

WebmistressM · 2020-02-24 01:43:45

gaekwad wrote #321856:

It was commonplace to deploy Textpattern with a lot of plugins to achieve certain functions. Now, the plugin ecosystem appears to be much quieter…whether this is a side effect of developers moving on, giving up or stopping caring…I don’t know.

I definitely can say I have noticed this. I feel like, even with what is opening up with the evolution to 4.7/4.8, there is much room for improvement of some of the concepts/purposes that plugins (back then) were accomplishing. However, yeah…. I think there is a high number of the older plugins where I can guess that maybe the developers/maintainers have moved on (from TextPattern, in general) since then.

gaekwad wrote #321856:

The web has changed over the last 5, 10 and 15 years, too. Sometimes I miss the old web. Sometimes I wonder if I use Textpattern because it reminds me of the old web…the effort people put in, the care that went into design, and content that was worth spending time on (writing and reading). The old web might be pushed into the shadows these days, but I’m still a cheerleader for it.

(I still don’t make enough of my own damn websites with Textpattern.)

I share alot of the sentiments about the internet of days of old. However, there is also something to say for Text Patterns simplicity (in some aesthetics and in how low-key it is compared to other CMS).

((I need to make more of my websites with TextPattern))

Bloke · 2020-02-24 02:41:03

Although quite a few plugin authors have drifted away, there are still a key bunch of kindly volunteers that take often-requested functionality and adopt the code to keep it going.

And if stuff is truly useful, we (cough, Oleg mainly) take the concept and package it up into a bitesize nugget that can be done natively.

Though the changes in 4.8 don’t seem voluminous on paper, the sheer scale of what can be done with built-in tags like orderable <txp:evaluate /> and its attribute counterpart, beefed-up <txp:output_form> and yield to build your own tags, plus pageless sections and development themes… an army of plugins can pretty much be eradicated with a little DIY glue.

We’re only beginning to scratch the surface of what Textpattern can do here, and we’ll be building on this in subsequent releases, each time ensuring we distill the features down to the most usable and useful ones out of the box. And documenting them :)

As we move forward, we’ll ensure to keep things as fast and nimble and lightweight as we possibly can, without adding bloat, so that the Just Write ethos remains at the heart of the CMS.

gaekwad · 2020-02-24 07:36:33

Bloke wrote #321862:

We’re only beginning to scratch the surface of what Textpattern can do here, and we’ll be building on this in subsequent releases, each time ensuring we distill the features down to the most usable and useful ones out of the box. And documenting them :)

As we move forward, we’ll ensure to keep things as fast and nimble and lightweight as we possibly can, without adding bloat, so that the Just Write ethos remains at the heart of the CMS.

Amen, brother.

This is why I’m here.

Textpattern CMS support forum

#1 2020-02-21 16:17:33