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[contrib] Textpattern on Rails
I had a quick flick through some of the posts, a lot of talk about deficiencies in textpattern.com website, stale codebase etc. I didn’t have much time to read all the posts, but there seems to be a lot of TXP frustration that has been building up, xpattern.net is one way of addressing this, I have another suggestion.
This might sound all crazy, but what about re-building Textpattern around the best of breed such as git, Ruby/Rails + rspec, all under Agile?
For the past year, I’ve been working with these technologies day in and day out, I see them being applied in all the wrong ways because of business constraints. When I take 2h in the evening/night from family or sleep time, I want to make that time count. Working with code that doesn’t have tests, working with PHP that cannot deal with proper OO or ancient technologies such as SVN or mod_php is not my idea of fun. Taking the best practices from what I do daily and applying them on a potentially exciting project such as Textpattern is definitely closer to my idea of “coding pron”.
So, I’m asking you all, do you honestly believe that you are ready for a Ruby/Rails version of Textpattern that would keep as much from the old functionality as possible, but with the following in the core:
- tags
- caching
- article versioning
- custom fields across all data types (articles, images, files etc.)
- contact form
- admin theme support
- proper plugin support with update functionality for all plugins
- patches by different developers pulled directly from their TXP forks (as well as painless custom implementations)
- multi-site support (this might make it into TXP 4.0.9 actually)
- templates (e-commerce, blog, photoblog etc.) – the database would be set up accordingly
I don’t see myself doing all this on my own – it’s more than 1 person can handle – and I’m not the 100% guy, I do 80% of the work in 20% of the time and then move on, come back as and when.
I have been sitting on this idea since I’ve released my glz_custom_fields plugin, always realizing that there is so much more that TXP could become. I kept saying to myself one day, one fine day, but it hasn’t happened in a year now, without making it public, bouncing some ideas off, see if there is even a remote interest in this, it’s very likely that this will fade away like most ideas do.
So, what’s your take?
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Re: [contrib] Textpattern on Rails
Yes please to the features. I suppose I could be talked into RoR…
But I’m no help, I’m pixel-pusher and not a smart-boy.
Last edited by mrdale (2009-03-19 02:45:05)
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Re: [contrib] Textpattern on Rails
Dale, if you go Rails, you’ll never go back, trust me on this one. It’s no longer FCGI hell but serene, Passenger + git + Capistrano heaven. I kept going wrong with the whole setup for the past 12 months+, have seen most of the pitfalls, including large, multi-server, multi-db clustered environments, it’s nice-to-have experience to say the least.
There will be plenty of stuff to do. Forum, documentation, general housekeeping, it’s the most basic tasks that people disregard but that actually are the most vital ones.
You have no idea how easy it would be to implement most of the features I mentioned in Rails. There are plugins/gems for most of the stuff, other bits are being built as we speak, Rails/github community is awesome!
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Re: [contrib] Textpattern on Rails
So are you considering a new CMS based on TXP ideals built on RoR? It would be interesting to see something like that. I’m still pretty fresh with Rails apps (both in developing and deploying), but if its as simple to use as TXP and has the same level of performance it’d be useful.
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Re: [contrib] Textpattern on Rails
No Amit, I am considering porting Textpattern to RoR and adding all the extra features that have been requested for years now.
The CMS would be the same, there would even be the same vanilla look (with other customizable themes for the admin, of course). I won’t change the way Textpattern works or the core principles, just the implementation. Plugins will still play the most important role for extending the core functionality, but more useful stuff such as tagging & unlimited, custom fields will be part of the core. I’m still not sure whether to make the contact form functionality part of the main codebase. I think that plugins are more appropriate for this kind of thing. I want to keep the core as slim as possible.
I would also like to replace the core tag parser with ERB syntax. What are your thoughts on this:
<%= article(:limit => 20, :form => "some_form_name") %>instead of the current
<txp:article limit="20" form="some_form_name" />Offline
Re: [contrib] Textpattern on Rails
gerhard wrote:
I didn’t have much time to read all the posts, but there seems to be a lot of TXP frustration that has been building up, xpattern.net is one way of addressing this, I have another suggestion.
The frustration was never about the language chosen to code Textpattern, it was the low number of core developers and the high number of plugin writers wanting to contribute more. There’s nothing wrong with PHP, most people who leave Textpattern move to Expression Engine, Drupal or Wordpress.
In the 3 plus years that I’ve followed Textpattern, a lot of talented, enthusiastic and friendly people have vacated the premises. Some have issued farewell posts, some have vanished into the tubes, never to be heard from again. One can only imagine where Textpattern would be today if someone would of taken charge and started to delegate.
My opinion is that the PHP code is solid, rather than code anew in RoR, fork it. Fork it for multi-site usage, call it TxPMU. Fork it for admin theme capabilities, call it TxPADM. Make another fork so the common man has theme capabilities, call it TxPSkins. And keep forking it every time a good idea comes about, cause it’s the GNU way of doing things.
And when one of these forks catches fire, like the Debian inspired Ubuntu did, then we’ll have a txp:new_home.
We Love TXP . TXP Themes . TXP Tags . TXP Planet . TXP Make
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Re: [contrib] Textpattern on Rails
gerhard wrote:
I would also like to replace the core tag parser with ERB syntax. What are your thoughts on this:
<%= article(:limit => 20, :form => "some_form_name") %>instead of the current
<txp:article limit="20" form="some_form_name" />I suppose there must be some programming advantage to [1] porting to rails and [2] dropping the simplicity of XML-like tags.
But from a designer’s point of view, those are two reasons I would not use such a CMS.
Last edited by reid (2009-03-19 13:21:38)
TextPattern user since 04/04/04
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Re: [contrib] Textpattern on Rails
gerhard wrote:
I would also like to replace the core tag parser with ERB syntax. What are your thoughts on this:
<%= article(:limit => 20, :form => "some_form_name") %>
Looks a lot like the PHP equivalent <?= article(array('limit' => '20', 'form' => 'some_form_name')) ?> which we had to use if we wouldn’t have Txp tags.
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Re: [contrib] Textpattern on Rails
Yep gerhard, sorry, but I like xml-esque tags. Is there a functional reason why you’d change the format?
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#10 2009-03-19 16:08:39
- saccade
- Plugin Author
- From: Neubeuern, Germany
- Registered: 2004-11-05
- Posts: 521
Re: [contrib] Textpattern on Rails
I’d never change the xml-ish tag-format.
I can’t even think of something that is that comprehensible for normal people (who possibly want to start working with textpattern for themselves, and have a clear, clean, general format/language with the current format).
I regard this as one of the centrepieces of txp’s good and fine character.
(Even if I sometimes glance at Rails thinking of it’s potential benefits: this code lets me look away at once and be happy with textpattern as it is – which I’m anyway :-)
Last edited by saccade (2009-03-19 16:12:12)
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Re: [contrib] Textpattern on Rails
gerhard wrote:
I would also like to replace the core tag parser with ERB syntax.
You might want to check out Radius for something similar to TXP tags.
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Re: [contrib] Textpattern on Rails
gerhard wrote:
This might sound all crazy, but what about re-building Textpattern around the best of breed such as git, Ruby/Rails + rspec, all under Agile?
My day job is all RoR, which btw is the main problem with getting my plugins finished – I find it hard to going back and forth between ruby and php. But the new gbp_permanent_links in heavily inspired from RoR. It does have a lot to offer… interesting idea. maybe.
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