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[mention] "Some Thoughts on Textpattern" by Capsize Designs
Finally, we found Textpattern. It had the simplicity we wanted, the templating engine of ExpressionEngine (basically), the CMS tools we needed, the flexibility everyone wants, it was perfect. And unlike SilverStripe, it worked. So we set forth!
This review catches the Txp spirit, IMHO.
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#2 2008-08-20 21:33:45
- MCrittenden
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- Registered: 2008-08-20
- Posts: 1
Re: [mention] "Some Thoughts on Textpattern" by Capsize Designs
Hey I wrote that! Thanks for the mention :)
- Mike, Capsize Designs
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Re: [mention] "Some Thoughts on Textpattern" by Capsize Designs
Second impression, what the heck is a form? Turns out, “forms” in Textpattern are little bits of code to use wherever you want. For example, we created a header and a footer form to include in all of the pages. Forms could definitely use a new name (Snippets, perhaps?).
I love this bit.
- )
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Re: [mention] "Some Thoughts on Textpattern" by Capsize Designs
My comment for that article:
Great article. Exactly all the reasons why I have chosen Textpattern and have realized some nice small websites with it. BUT I have absolutely no doubt that Textpattern is also able big sites with big traffic. Yes, the community feature list is near zero but hey, if you need a forum or member blogs then don’t take Textpattern.
and I like this part:
articles are EVERYTHING. Don’t think of articles as articles (or blogs), think of them as content.
Beside understanding the forms this aspect is somehow hard to explain to beginners who talk about ‘my webpages’ all the time.
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Re: [mention] "Some Thoughts on Textpattern" by Capsize Designs
Forms could definitely use a new name…
I like this bit too, because it’s been said a thousand times, or more.
A new name would ideally be something that communicates the concept of inserting chunks of packaged markup, which further must be understood as a kind of content itself. I would avoid any term that has already been used in the industry for something else (e.g., snippets), unless it exactly matches the concept. (We can see where that has been a problem, afterall, with the word “form.”)
Some ideas:
- Includes
- Inserts
- Blocks
- Chunks
- Pieces
- Packages
You could improve meaning on a few of those by compounding the semantics another word:
- Content Blocks
- Markup Blocks
- Content Chunks
- Content Packages
I must be missing some other ideas. Anyway, assuming it was desirable (I think it would be), how hard would it be to do? Documentation could be updated easy enough, but what about code?
Last edited by Destry (2008-08-27 10:41:12)
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Re: [mention] "Some Thoughts on Textpattern" by Capsize Designs
The majority of the user-facing UI terminology is just a few volatile bits in the language database on rpc.textpattern.com, so it won’t affect to code that much.
Legacy data, i.e. tags and attribute names are a different issue, and I don’t think that anyone of those promoting a rename of forms to, say, “foobars” would propose a rename of <txp:output_form form="baz" /> to <txp:output_foobar foobar="baz" /> while deprecating the old tag and attribute names. Which in turn introduces the need of a tagname compatibility software layer or a migration tool and thus immediately clashes with our tag line “Textpattern is an elegant, easy-to- use CMS…”
Looks like a full-fledged Pandora’s box, so I’d suggest to enjoy a quote from Faust I by J. W. von Goethe instead:
“Namen sind Schall und Rauch” (Name is but sound and smoke)
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Re: [mention] "Some Thoughts on Textpattern" by Capsize Designs
If it weren’t for the legacy stuff that Robert already mentioned, I’d go one step further and combine forms + pages and call it templates, because there isn’t any real difference between forms and pages.
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Re: [mention] "Some Thoughts on Textpattern" by Capsize Designs
wet wrote
Looks like a full-fledged Pandora’s box
Damn it. I hate Pandora!
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