Textpattern CMS support forum
You are not logged in. Register | Login | Help
- Topics: Active | Unanswered
Re: Marketing TXP
kvnmcwebn wrote:
who designed the original txp logo?
dean allen, i guess.
Offline
Re: Marketing TXP
I have to disagree again, Jonathan. I don’t mean to shoot you down, just this one idea. It is NOT a good method to promote TXP, like it or not. Perhaps complete newbies to the net might think it’s great but TXP is aimed at designers and (I believe) bloggers who want something more flexible than WP. This sort of blogger is sick of banners, spam etc.
If we really want people to view the latest news, an attractive image link would make it more visible, but when you start putting more images in the download it’s going down a slippery road, imho.
If there should be a news section on the front page of textpattern.com, what news do we want to see? Txplanet shows there’s a lot of news to choose from.
Dozy P My attempt at music
Offline
Re: Marketing TXP
Catching up here.
Is there current development of a new look for textpattern.com – or is this discussion the beginnings of “how to proceed/what it include”?
Offline
Re: Marketing TXP
Hi Tom, I hope this is the start of that discussion, not sure what is the status of the new look from Kevin Potts. Just don’t say anything about a dashboard with TXP news (spam)….!! ;-)
Offline
Re: Marketing TXP
Dashboard news = bad news.
- )
Sorry. Had to do it.
Last edited by renobird (2008-06-17 17:44:21)
Offline
Re: Marketing TXP
OK. So Kevin is working on the new look?
Seems like you would need a good wireframe before you can build a new look…and this thread sounds like a lot of those ideas are still being discussed.
Offline
Offline
Re: Marketing TXP
Zero,
Thanks for the heads up. My wife and I have a 9 month old…so I’m just coming out of my “new dad” fog. I’ve got some catching up to do.
Cheers!
—
Tom
Offline
Re: Marketing TXP
wet wrote:
Which of course won’t negate the usefulness of client-specific dashboards, but then again what would those clients gain from receiving updates on alls thing Textpattern?
It doesn’t need to be Textpattern related updates. If this was a plugin, those that use Textpattern as a tool for their client base could inject their own specific feeds. Businesses that use Textpattern for their intranets could use it to keep their department authors updated on company wide news.
The way Wordpress uses the dashboard might not be how we envision it, but we shouldn’t dismiss it completely.
We Love TXP . TXP Themes . TXP Tags . TXP Planet . TXP Make
Offline
#100 2008-06-17 17:56:22
Re: Marketing TXP
hcgtv wrote
It doesn’t need to be Textpattern related updates. If this was a plugin, those that use Textpattern as a tool for their client base could inject their own specific feeds. Businesses that use Textpattern for their intranets could use it to keep their department authors updated on company wide news.
Sounds like a great idea. I second it.
Offline
#101 2008-06-17 18:13:21
Re: Marketing TXP
jstubbs wrote:
This is what I suggest:
- textpattern.com…
- plugins.textpattern.com…
- templates.textpattern.com…
- docs.textpattern.com..
Some facets on the topic of domains and the desirable consolidation of resources:
- Textpattern.com and .org are registered by Dean Allen.
- Textpattern.net is registered by someone with privacy protection enabled, probably Destry (I was too late in 2005 to the party to know for sure).
- These three sites are hosted on a donated server by Joyent, backed by a support staff of one (1) person in his spare time.
- Requirements for server admin capacity from the dev team reduce development time. The collective expertise is scarce for some fraction of the involved components. As we’ve seen in the occasion of the moribund Trac host, this leaves a bit to desire.
Given this environment, I would assume that some services can reliably be hosted on a central resource (i.e. *.textpattern.com), while other services are better off with a decentralised cloud.
Reasonably manageable central services could include the project website, forum, and docs.
Hosting plugins is not a core requirement – every plugin author managed to spare a few bytes on her own so far. A future incarnation of Textpattern (the application and/or the site) could provide a standard channel to communicate update needs and/or download methods between site administrators and plugin authors along the line of the “Check for updates” button which Txp incorporates itself.
I’m very indetermined about themes/templates. As long as we have no established means of deploying these, there’s little rationale in a central repository for them.
Offline
#102 2008-06-17 18:47:50
Re: Marketing TXP
I think .net was provided by Dean as well if I remember the whole Textbook inception correctly, although it could be Ubernostrom. I don’t think Destry actually owns the domain.
Shoving is the answer – pusher robot
Offline
#103 2008-06-17 18:52:04
Re: Marketing TXP
wet wrote:
- These three sites are hosted on a donated server by Joyent, backed by a support staff of one (1) person in his spare time.
- Requirements for server admin capacity from the dev team reduce development time. The collective expertise is scarce for some fraction of the involved components. As we’ve seen in the occasion of the moribund Trac host, this leaves a bit to desire.
I want to be delicate in asking this given the long history of mutual encouragement that TextDrive/Joyent and Textpattern have enjoyed. Forgive me if I’m opening the proverbial “can of worms”. Is there an implication that the current hosting situation (and required administration) needs to be evaluated to determine if it might be detracting from long term goals/success?
wet wrote:
I’m very indetermined about themes/templates. As long as we have no established means of deploying these, there’s little rationale in a central repository for them.
From a development/delivery standpoint I would concur re: themes/templates. From a marketing standpoint I’m would suggest that creating easy access to what is out there is a plus for new customers. Is it enough of a plus to outweigh the fact that they have to copy & paste? There’s the debate.
Offline
#104 2008-06-17 19:05:21
Re: Marketing TXP
maverick wrote:
Is there an implication that the current hosting situation (and required administration) needs to be evaluated to determine if it might be detracting from long term goals/success?
No, not with the scope of services I sketched in my previous post. And this scope is mainly determined by capacities with no dependence on what Joyent or any other host would deliver. Administration capacity might impose a limit in the future when additional needs arise, but this would have to be fulfilled by us and not by the hosting provider.
Offline
#105 2008-06-17 19:27:51
Re: Marketing TXP
And a big debate it is too Mike. I would hesitate at trying to move Textgarden into a central location as it is quite a complex task to not only list all available themes but also have demos for them. In fact, not long after being handed the reigns to the site by Dean, I found it too complex to do the whole thing in a single site. For that reason all the demos for my own ports are now located on the j.a.t. site. This separation makes managing everything a lot easier oddly enough.
With regard to showing which version of TXP a theme is suitable for I added an extra field to allow for this and if you check the site you will see that I have started using that field for some of my own ports. Problem of course is time. I don’t have as much of it as I used to so the process is rather slow. I shall get there eventually, but it will only be for my own ports. In my view it is the designer’s responsibility to update their own themes. I definitely don’t have time to sort everyone else’s themes out.
I did discuss with Bert some time back about converting my ports to use his plug-in which would make things a lot easier for users to install a theme however, after I had thought about it for a while, this would make it more time-consuming to keep the downloads up-to-date. At present the j.a.t. site uses the latest revision of TXP via SVN so I immediately see any problems with a theme that might arise from any new TXP code. It is then an easy matter to make any necessary changes on-site which I can then easily transfer to the download file using an editor, re-zipping and uploading to Textgarden. If I use one of the template plug-ins I would need to install the theme to a vanilla install of TXP which includes the plug-in, make the necessary changes, output all the forms, pages and CSS via the plug-in, re-zip them and upload the new zip to Textgarden.
As Robert suggests, I think we need to wait until a uniform method for deploying themes is arrived at. Until then I think Textgarden should be left out of this discussion.
Last edited by thebombsite (2008-06-17 21:58:52)
Stuart
In a Time of Universal Deceit
Telling the Truth is Revolutionary.
Offline