xPattern - Your questions answered

Manfre · 2008-01-24 18:16:18

What is xPattern?

xPattern is an open source fork based upon the 4.0 dev branch of Textpattern. Its goal is to improve the application to better fit the needs and desires of the community.

The biggest change you will notice in the initial release of xPattern will be a redesigned admin interface. The current UI is outdated and doesn’t have a consistent design between tabs.

Note that this is not the xPattern initiative that first cropped up and faded away months ago. mrdale was kind enough to let us use the name.

Who are involved?

Team xPattern and a few others who have yet to create accounts on LaunchPad.

What is LaunchPad?

LaunchPad is a collaboration site that enables decentralized developers to work together without the expected chaos. It was created for the ubuntu linux community and is now used by many open source projects.

What started this?

Over the years, there has been a very noticable communication gaps between the core developers and the rest of the community. They have done a very good job of helping those in need, but for those of us who would like to give back have felt stunted. Repeated outcries for direction and lack of feedback on submitted patches have left a few of us feeling like unwanted outsiders. xPattern discussions started as a community driven branch (hosted by textpattern) that would give these now jaded members of the community a centralized outlet for their talents. A place where we could colloborate on code and design that would streamline the process of us giving back to Textpattern. Both Mary and Ruud shot down this idea for various reasons. Rob and Sencer provided no feedback. The momentum of those involved was not slowed by this and we continued to move on with our desire to colloborate and make Textpattern better.

What about Crockery?

Crockery has been in the incubator for a very long time. Only the core devs have any idea of if/when it will be released. There is no posted feature set or goals for the release, beyond switching the license from GPLv2 to BSD to allow for commercial plugin development.

Are you done helping out with Textpattern?

Short answer, no. Our code will be synchronized with the 4.0 dev branch of Textpattern. It will be very easy for a Textpattern dev to merge our work back in to Textpattern. The devs have stated that 4.0 is on feature freeze and the xPattern changes cannot be merged in to Crockery because of incompatible licensing.

The xPattern crew still frequents the textpattern forum and chat in the #textpattern IRC channel. I’m not sure how much our involvement will be in 6 months, but that depends as much on Textpattern as it does on xPattern.

What about the plugins?

A few of us run many sites and routinely install 5-30 plugins to get needed functionality. We don’t like having to do this all the time and will be resolving this in a few ways that are still being discussed. Changes we make will break plugins, but we will do our best to ensure the functionality exists on xPattern. This will be done by either adding features in to the core or updating plugin code. Team xPattern consists of a few of the more active txp plugin developers and our initial changes will help insure better long term plugin compatibility.

Feel free to ask more questions. You can do so in this thread or over on the xPattern forum

Last edited by Manfre (2008-01-24 18:30:37)

jstubbs · 2008-01-24 22:24:45

I guess the first questions would be what were the reasons that the TXP devs gave for not having a community driven branch?

Seems like those of you in the xPattern crew have gone silent – Gocom, iblastoff etc – are you guys going to remain active in this forum, and with TXP in general?

mrdale · 2008-01-24 23:34:51

jstubbs wrote:

I guess the first questions would be what were the reasons that the TXP devs gave for not having a community driven branch?

Devs?

Bloke · 2008-01-24 23:39:04

I’ll let someone else field the 1st part of your question properly, since I wasn’t privvy to the decision. I guess diluting the TXP name with a branch when there’s already crockery gets confusing for attracting new users to my fave ultra-lightweight CMS. I also speculate that SVN is not really designed for it and a small team is more efficient (guessing here; too many cooks and all that?) Plus a community branch is only as useful as the ability to easily merge changes into the core; and wth the diversity of long-term changes planned that’s less likely as time goes on. With Bazaar, true distributed community development is much easier and suits more diverse workflows; we’re just taking advantage of it. But the project is still a two-way process. The TXP devs aren’t the enemy or anything, and if we do something that fits into TXP then that’s sweet.

I have no beef with the devs of TXP; they are absolutely awesome, have drive, commitment and integrity (and know exactly when to say “no” for the good of the product). I simply thought xPattern sounded cool the way mrdale sold it to me and I often find myself in the 20% of the 80:20 rule wishing that sometimes it was that tiny bit easier to do X and Y (mind you, I could just be using TXP wrongly/not to its full capacity. I still have a lot to learn).

But with TXP’s flexibility, power, stability, lightfootedness and community spirit to build on, then as long as we don’t get carried away putting stuff in the core for the sake of it, xPattern can only be stronger for it and cater for those times when I look out the window and go “if only…”

Sure, it may not suit everyone — and there’s always TXP — but for those people that have reached the limit of what TXP can do for them, xPattern is the next step up without having to learn a whole new way of working; it’s the same genus of animal underneath. Just with claws.

jstubbs wrote:

Seems like those of you in the xPattern crew have gone silent – Gocom, iblastoff etc – are you guys going to remain active in this forum, and with TXP in general?

I know it’s not much consolation when compared with giants like iblastoff and Gocom et al, but I’m not planning on going anywhere any time soon :-D

I’m currently only a fringe member of xPat since I can only log in a few days a week at the moment and all the stuff that’s being developed right now is either out of my programming league or to do with the look and feel. If you’ve seen any of my own sites you’ll know why I’m not part of that bit!

For now I’m content with lurking, making minor mods/suggestions, asking stupid questions and soaking up the direction the project is going. And I can always do documentation support in the meantime. When the time comes to get my hands dirty properly I’ll still be here to support my plugin habit :-p

Last edited by Bloke (2008-01-25 00:12:53)

thebombsite · 2008-01-25 00:16:50

I am only on the fringes of xPat as well mainly because Matthew is keeping me rather busy at the moment and also because I’m no PHP guru. I shall probably get more involved when things like (X)HTML/CSS and help docs etc start to come to the fore. I certainly have no intentions of being absent from this forum and helping out where I can and I’m not looking at stopping use of Textpattern any time in the near future.

Sorry, but you are stuck with me. ;)

els · 2008-01-25 00:19:32

Bloke wrote:

I know it’s not much consolation when compared with giants like iblastoff and Gocom et al, but I’m not planning on going anywhere any time soon :-D

When the time comes to get my hands dirty properly I’ll still be here to support my plugin habit :-p

That’s good to hear, Stef!

net-carver · 2008-01-25 17:48:35

jstubbs, Els

please don’t interpret my recent quietness here as an exit. I’m busy with a few other things right now so neither Txp or xPat are really getting my attention.

However, speaking for myself, I plan no exit from here at the moment but this might change down the line as xPattern develops. Despite best intentions now, I doubt I’ll find time to support plugin development for both platforms if they diverge in their inner workings.

Last edited by net-carver (2008-01-25 17:51:27)

els · 2008-01-25 18:47:40

Steve, thanks for being open about this, it’s what I expected. I expect it will be the same for the other plugin authors involved, Stef included. I appreciate the good intentions, but I won’t hold my breath.

For me, and for everyone else who is not planning to go anywhere, this means we will have to go and find alternatives for the plugins in question, better now than wait till things stop working. Though there is no way yet to tell if xPattern will indeed develop as you intend, and you might all be back before most people have realized you were gone, I am not going to sit and wait for that.

(Manfre and other team xPattern members: I am as much a member of the TXP community as your small group of people who happen to know how to code and who feel that their well intended contributions were rejected unjustly. So please stop referring to this group as ‘the community’.)

hcgtv · 2008-01-25 19:30:12

Els wrote:

So please stop referring to this group as ‘the community’.

Els,

Textpattern is a GPL licensed project. As such, it has benefited from the many volunteers that have come from every corner of the world to help out. The xPattern group has decided to exercise it’s GPL right, nothing more, nothing less.

The Open Source Definition:

3. Derived Works

The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

Community Driven Textpattern

iblastoff · 2008-01-25 19:30:33

Els wrote:

Steve, thanks for being open about this, it’s what I expected. I expect it will be the same for the other plugin authors involved, Stef included. I appreciate the good intentions, but I won’t hold my breath.

For me, and for everyone else who is not planning to go anywhere, this means we will have to go and find alternatives for the plugins in question, better now than wait till things stop working. Though there is no way yet to tell if xPattern will indeed develop as you intend, and you might all be back before most people have realized you were gone, I am not going to sit and wait for that.

(Manfre and other team xPattern members: I am as much a member of the TXP community as your small group of people who happen to know how to code and who feel that their well intended contributions were rejected unjustly. So please stop referring to this group as ‘the community’.)

no one is claiming the whole community has shifted. its simply a fork driven by members OF the community. it was intended to actually be a branch of textpattern but the developers weren’t interested in participating.

personally, my future efforts/plugins will be going towards xpattern. i don’t intend to abandon textpattern or leave these forums though.

we’re all doing this because we like textpattern but have extended our goals for it.

Last edited by iblastoff (2008-01-25 19:43:24)

mrdale · 2008-01-25 20:02:33

>Els

This is a positive thing.

Plugin devs who’ve been restricted from contributing meaningfully to core, get to experiment, extend and enhance TXP in a way that was not possible within the current administration of TXP. XPattern is only under a different roof because requests to handle the community branch within the existing community were rejected.

So nothing about the way core TXP is maintained will change. And you will see another project begin to take shape.

What’s not to like?

Manfre · 2008-01-25 20:03:05

Els wrote:
For me, and for everyone else who is not planning to go anywhere, this means we will have to go and find alternatives for the plugins in question, better now than wait till things stop working. Though there is no way yet to tell if xPattern will indeed develop as you intend, and you might all be back before most people have realized you were gone, I am not going to sit and wait for that.

All of the plugins in question are GPL and over the years I personally have gone out of my way to make it easy for others to incorporate, extend or modify any of the code I have written. All of my plugins and a few of my patches can be found on my public svn. At this time, I will continue to maintain and improve my plugins. I have no plans of updating my plugins to work with crockery.

Els wrote:
(Manfre and other team xPattern members: I am as much a member of the TXP community as your small group of people who happen to know how to code and who feel that their well intended contributions were rejected unjustly. So please stop referring to this group as ‘the community’.)

As stated, we are and have been members of the [textpattern] community. At no point have we ever stated or implied that we are the entire community.

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#1 2008-01-24 18:16:18

xPattern - Your questions answered

#2 2008-01-24 22:24:45

Re: xPattern - Your questions answered

#3 2008-01-24 23:34:51

Re: xPattern - Your questions answered

#4 2008-01-24 23:39:04

Re: xPattern - Your questions answered

#5 2008-01-25 00:16:50

Re: xPattern - Your questions answered

#6 2008-01-25 00:19:32

Re: xPattern - Your questions answered

#7 2008-01-25 17:48:35

Re: xPattern - Your questions answered

#8 2008-01-25 18:47:40

Re: xPattern - Your questions answered

#9 2008-01-25 19:30:12

Re: xPattern - Your questions answered

#10 2008-01-25 19:30:33

Re: xPattern - Your questions answered

#11 2008-01-25 20:02:33

Re: xPattern - Your questions answered

#12 2008-01-25 20:03:05

Re: xPattern - Your questions answered

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