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I had never heard of it (Textpattern) before
Looking from Textpattern mentions in Google’s Realtime and I came across this:
Then I found Textpattern ( textpattern.com ), I had never heard of it before and was surprised to read that it has been going for as long as WordPress.
What can we do to change this?
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Re: I had never heard of it (Textpattern) before
My thought is: should we change this? I chose Textpattern among other CMS because of its flexibility and simplicity. Too much success brings heaviness and complexity. So should we really change this ?
(Today is philosophy day)
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#3 2011-06-16 20:51:12
- els
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Re: I had never heard of it (Textpattern) before
No, let’s keep it a secret ;)
Very nice article though!
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Re: I had never heard of it (Textpattern) before
Els wrote:
Very nice article though!
Yes, it does show that when you give it a try, Textpattern grows on you.
Another good article mentioning Textpattern, a good history lesson of sorts.
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Re: I had never heard of it (Textpattern) before
I heard of textpattern last year. I would liked to have heard of it sooner. Fewer headaches than having to deal with the other cms/blogs out there.
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Re: I had never heard of it (Textpattern) before
JimJoe wrote:
I heard of textpattern last year. I would liked to have heard of it sooner. Fewer headaches than having to deal with the other cms/blogs out there.
Bingo! This is exactly why Txp should not remain a secret. There are many good people out there who might recognize how Txp can make their lives easier if they just discovered it in a good way to begin with. The author of that article Bert pointed out is a perfect example. (Unfortunately, he didn’t say how he found Txp, which would have been useful to know.) And look what he did, he wrote a great article about it.
I feel an essay coming on…
Writing articles is one way of promoting Txp, of course, and it’s the way this community has always seemed to rely on. There’s been a few fangirl sites over the years too. But all-in-all how’s that been working out for Txp? It’s still a vein of undiscovered gold, by my reckoning.
Point is, people need to be more proactive when making the message. Just writing articles doesn’t mean much if your site isn’t popular, or your not bringing attention to those articles. Unlike suggested in Kevin Costner’s old movie, building it does not mean they’ll come. Some obvious ways to augment the situation are to use social channels, give talks at events, and (something I’ve mentioned before) breath life back into the old TXP Mag and put in the main .com menu.
Social channels – You know what these are, but you may not realize how much reach they actually have. Using them means you’re going out to where the people are already at, rather than expecting them to find your cave (website) hidden away in the hills. Twitter is great for this, and especially if you’re savvy about using hashtags. And no, sorry, 2 tweets per year isn’t going to cut it. Throw out a Txp tweet a couple of times per week. Facebook, it’s practically rivaling Google in terms of people using it. I know, I know…it’s hard to even say Facebook without getting a bitter taste on your tongue, but that doesn’t change the fact it’s a monster for catching people’s attention. Problem is, like always, it has to be used correctly. Textpattern has a Facebook site, which is about as useful as a dried cat turd. That’s no offense to the creator, I’m sure it was done with sincere love, but love is only part of the equation—it has to be followed up with action. Regular action. All these channels operating under the “Textpattern” name need a communication strategy. They need to be in sync. That’s not easy, but it is the answer.
Talking at events – Since 2004, I know of only one — ONE — instance of somebody giving a live presentation. I dont’ have the link where it was talked about anymore but I have the slidedeck (a bit dated now), and it’s really sharp. It was given in 2006 or 7, I think, by a designer in Malaysia, if I’m not mistaken. Compare that sad state with any other open source CMS worth mentioning. Nuff said.
TXP Mag – This was a great resource that has been left by the roadside like a broken television. Even today I’m sure it gets a few hits, but it’s in such disarray and the content unchanged that it’s now slowly fading like a half-life metal. I said it before, this should be adopted by .com with renewed vigor—fixing up the old stuff, and generating new—making it Textpattern’s swan fountain of new and varied content on the world of Txp. But, I’ll be the first to say, you need people on this, not the devs themselves, they’ve got other things to do. First and foremost you need an editor who ensures the mag stays alive and maintains an editorial schedule. It would also need a designer or two as necessary over time. And of course contributed articles. I’ll be honest, I wouldn’t hate being the editor. And one of my aims over time would be to make the mag a source of revenue that could be rolled back into the development of Txp. But I can’t do it alone. I’m pretty damn busy. The magazine would need a small team of dedicated people. That doesn’t mean a horse committee, it means a small team of dedicated people who don’t mind talking together behind the scenes on Skype! But, you know, if it isn’t in the cards, it isn’t in the cards, and I’m not going to lose sleep over it.
Well, that was way more than I meant to say. Back to my cave in the hills I go.
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Re: I had never heard of it (Textpattern) before
Destry,
Thanks again for taking the time to share your insight.
Here’s to hoping that the TXP North Bristol Meetup formulates a plan.
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Re: I had never heard of it (Textpattern) before
hcgtv wrote:
Another good article mentioning Textpattern, a good history lesson of sorts.
I assume you are being ironic by calling this “history.”
Textpattern, originally designed by Dean Allen, became popular in the early 2000s only to meet a decline in use and support.
Textpattern was released in August of 2004, a little later for the early 2000s and some 8 months after Wordpress. Which as I have written about before, means that it was in wide release when Movable Type users began looking for something else in May. As they say, Timing is everything.
Has there been a decline in use and support? Could be, but that is true of everything including WordPress.
The Textpattern platform lacked a few key elements that WordPress had: ultra-ease of installation, and the portability of templates (Textpattern).
To answer both points at once: I pretty wiped out my first Wordpress install because the uploading the install overwrote all the customization I had done to the template. Installation is easier (you don’t have to upload the config.php file – it gets created for you) and templates are more portable since February of 2005 but WordPress was actually pretty popular before that.
Thus, Textpattern shut out a valuable side of the platform connecting users to great and easy to use templates to enhance the design and aesthetics of their websites.
I don’t disagree with that one although the timeline of events is off.
While Textpattern theme repositories do exist, the lack of standardization of tags across websites make these themes more difficult to change once a user has committed to a particular theme.
I assuming he is trying to make a point here, but “the lack of standardization of tags” is meaningless to me.
What was more challenging to the platform, however, was that Dean Allen abandoned the platform in pursuit of other interests.
I don’t know that I would describe his leaving as “abandoning.”
In a violation of Principle III, Allen had been working unpaid on the platform, and finally gave up.
Lots of successful open source projects have been and continue to be created and maintained by unpaid volunteers including Textpattern. But that doesn’t describe Dean’s situation at all. Dean was getting funding through TextDrive. A whole bunch of us did the whole VC thing. I don’t know why Dean sold to Joyent and made his exit without saying goodbye but to describe it as he “gave up” is laughable at best. After all, his other sure-fire get-rich-quick scheme didn’t make him a billionaire, either.
Since the project was under GPL, a small set of developers picked up where the project left off.
Just like a small group of developers picked up the pieces of B2 when the founder left.
But the lack of a commercially interested benevolent dictator caused the project to sputter.
How long has the GNU Project been around and has anyone every referred to Richard Stallman as a “commercially interested benevolent dictator?” Of course, it is also true that Richard never got his sites removed by Google for questionable practices.
Whereas WordPress was able to guarantee its product’s longevity through this benevolent dictator model—a core requirement for consumer open-source platforms—Allen was not.
WordPress didn’t guarantee success, it was just lucky enough to succeed. A benevolent dictator is not a core requirement – this guy is living in some sort of proto-fascist fantasy world. I am glad that WordPress makes him happy – I have some sites running WordPress myself. But if he is going to post “History” on the Internet for other people to read, he really should try a little harder to be objective.
Last edited by michaelkpate (2011-06-19 21:22:51)
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Re: I had never heard of it (Textpattern) before
michaelkpate wrote:
I assume you are being ironic by calling this “history.”
For most of 2004 and 2005 I was knee deep in another project, so my history of Textpattern is mostly derived by following this forum and reading through the lines. Six years ago, any blog project on the web had the same chance that WordPress took advantage of, and we all knew it.
The benevolent dictator on the project I was working on came on the developer list one day and told everybody that he wasn’t interested in competing in the blog wars. Did he get cold feet, we’ll never know. Matt on the other hand grabbed the opportunity and ran with it. Timing is indeed everything, but you have to have a leader and the right set of followers to take advantage of it.
The Internet is an infant at this point, all this talk about who’s in the lead is akin to saying your 6 year old can hit out of the park in T-ball, your proud of course, but it’s a long road to the major leagues. What I’m seeing nowadays is a throwback to the old days of computing, SAAS (Software as a Service) – we called it time-sharing, Cloud computing – dumb terminals hooked up to mainframes. What’s old is new, it happens in every industry.
So Michael, this isn’t over, WordPress might have won a few key battles but the blog wars are far from over.
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Re: I had never heard of it (Textpattern) before
hcgtv wrote:
So Michael, this isn’t over, WordPress might have won a few key battles but the blog wars are far from over.
If I were going to declare a winner at this point, it would be either Twitter or Facebook, not WordPress.
The benevolent dictator on the project I was working on came on the developer list one day and told everybody that he wasn’t interested in competing in the blog wars. Did he get cold feet, we’ll never know. Matt on the other hand grabbed the opportunity and ran with it. Timing is indeed everything, but you have to have a leader and the right set of followers to take advantage of it.
I went back and re-read Matt’s original post again:
Well, Textpattern looks like everything I could ever want, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be licensed under something politically I could agree with. Fortunately, b2/cafelog is GPL, which means that I could use the existing codebase to create a fork, integrating all the cool stuff that Michel would be working on right now if only he was around. – Matt
In the history, one could infer that Textpattern was always under the GPL. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. And I am not sure that at the time Matt was thinking what was going to come out of that post. Textpattern did suffer though from the lack of the leader/follower dynamic. Dean was solo coding from 2001 to around the time of the beta releases. Perhaps Mike Little gets too little credit.
The Internet is an infant at this point, all this talk about who’s in the lead is akin to saying your 6 year old can hit out of the park in T-ball, your proud of course, but it’s a long road to the major leagues. What I’m seeing nowadays is a throwback to the old days of computing, SAAS (Software as a Service) – we called it time-sharing, Cloud computing – dumb terminals hooked up to mainframes. What’s old is new, it happens in every industry.
While there is always a certain amount of people who will trade control for simplicity, which is why we were discussing the growth of Tumblr, not everyone is. Wordpress is great – until you run into something that it doesn’t do or can only do with a great deal of extra work.
I missed the time sharing/dumb terminals era. My first computer was a Commodore VIC 20 my junior year of high school.
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Re: I had never heard of it (Textpattern) before
michaelkpate wrote:
If I were going to declare a winner at this point, it would be either Twitter or Facebook, not WordPress.
At this point, yes, Twitter and Facebook have the lead in mind share. I use neither.
Seeing as Blogger came before WordPress and Google has deeper pockets, who do you think gets .blog?
I’ll register bertgarcia.blog, which just points to my own site, Google in turn grabs my RSS or Atom feeds and creates a Twitter like service, then new tags are created that identifies me on the web and Facebook is in their crosshairs, all built around the .blog gTLD. May sound far-fetched, but if I’m going to pick a winner on the Internet, it’s Google.
My first computer was a Commodore VIC 20 my junior year of high school.
My first home computer was a TI-99/4A, taught myself BASIC on it
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Re: I had never heard of it (Textpattern) before
I dumped WordPress and Movable Type once I found Textpattern as it is far better. I certainly get faster useful responses on the forum here than there.
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Re: I had never heard of it (Textpattern) before
Guys we don’t have enough bad news – compared to alternative CMS – to make Textpattern a trending topic in social media world. The superior alternative CMS discussion is powered by people not getting it after setting up their CMS.
Let’s face the marketing situation: We need more bloated code, more security holes, more raw PHP obstacles and at least one crashing TXP core update every week.
Microsoft is a great archetype.
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Re: I had never heard of it (Textpattern) before
merz1 wrote:
Guys we don’t have enough bad news – compared to alternative CMS – to make Textpattern a trending topic in social media world. The superior alternative CMS discussion is powered by people not getting it after setting up their CMS.
I know you’re being partly facetious, but let’s actually look at this situation closer.
First, let’s drop the word “trending”, because nobody (certainly not me) is talking about competing with Lady Gaga.
Also, we can be honest and admit Txp’s track record hasn’t always been a bed of roses.
Yet while problems are often the nature of social discussion, it’s not always that way. Nor is talking about problems necessarily bad, on the contrary. The point isn’t whether the discussion is bad or good, but that the discussion is happening at all, openly, where more people see it. When someone observes a problem being voiced in the social air, and someone else (especially a representative) responds in timely, courteous fashion with a satisfying answer/solution, people see that and value the “customer service” more than they hang on the initial problem; they take note of the good intention and commitment to the cause. This is observed in social media all the time, and companies (or open source projects) that practice it are reaping rewards. It’s about a project showing it cares, and that’s where this community shines—it cares! Right?
/* turns attention to the crowd */
We talk about this community as one of the friendliest and most helpful out there. While this may be true, the emphasis seems to be more on this bulletin board than the actual people. This even comes across right in textpattern.com’s Support copy…
“No web site is an island so when you need to reach out, Textpattern’s community is there for you. If you cannot find what you are looking for in the Textpattern manual then the forum is the place to visit.
.
Widely regarded as one of the most helpful and mature CMS forums, you can seek answers and ask questions of fellow site designers, developers and enthusiasts. Even the core development team hang out there and regularly answer questions, as well as actively supporting their own plugins.”
(I still laugh reading that, which just seems a little over the top.)
The real problem, as I see it, is that this friendly, courteous community has lived inside this aging and crumbling bulletin board for too long. While the forum has served it’s purpose in the past, this community is long past due for a migration outward. Another bulletin board is not the answer! That’s not to say the forum doesn’t still have it’s place. But I think it’s a smaller role that what is currently heaped upon it.
Let’s look at all the discussion forums in these boards:
- Official Announcements
- Development (Existing Issues, Corrected/Resolved Issues, Internationalisation, Feature Ideas, etc.)
- How Do I…? & Other Questions
- Plugins
- Presentation
- Textile
- Developer Support
- Latest Happenings
- How-tos and Examples
- Lets see yours, then
- Mentions
- Seeking Txp Pros
- Contributing
- User Documentation
- Feedback
- General Discussions
- Forum and Website
- International Users
Now, let’s take out what should be channeled through textpattern.com, as either new content or regular blog posting:
- Official Announcements
- Textile (textile.textpattern.com)
- Developer Support
- Latest Happenings
- Mentions
- Contributing
Forum andWebsite
Now remove what should be handled in the new and improved Plugins site (textpattern.org):
- Plugins
Now let’s take out what could feasibly be handled in documentation (and maybe a move away from Mediawiki to something more cloud-based):
- How Do I…?
& Other Questions - How-tos and Examples
- User Documentation
- FAQ (note this is a move from .com to .net, slowly in progress)
Now removing what could feasibly be handled in a more high-traffic (social) channel (and this is as much for promoting Txp as it is providing support):
- Seeking Txp Pros
- General Discussions
Leaving a lot less:
- Development (Existing Issues, Corrected/Resolved Issues, Internationalisation, Feature Ideas, etc.)
- Presentation
- Lets see yours, then
- Forum
and Website - International Users
Note that what remains are conversational topics that can get rather complicated (languages, code examples, etc.), and so a bulletin board is a decent fit.
I’d question the value of Presentation simply because it’s not Textpattern specific and there’s a million other sites on the web that provide the juice.
International Users is a tough one—you look at those forums and see they’re not really used, but the forum is probably as good of place as any for localized conversations.
You can see some cross pollination going on here too, like TextGarden taking on presentation discussions since that’s the context. And even TXP Mag rolling some content too on these areas, highlighting activities and pointing people in the right direction, etc.
At any rate, by making content (and conversations) more distributed—by putting it where it should go—you also make it easier for people to find (especially first-timers), or at least where they are more likely to stumble across it. This will help search rankings too, which you may recall was one key factor in the 2010 CMS market share report.
On the other hand, remaining inside a silo does make for a controlled environment, though silos aren’t much good for anything but old, dried corn, which some of us might start resembling. :)
Last edited by Destry (2011-06-23 12:53:44)
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Re: I had never heard of it (Textpattern) before
While this may be true, the emphasis seems to be more on this bulletin board than the actual people.
No and Yes. Some people do monitor the social streams for the tags (or hashtags) TXP and Textpattern. The feed I monitor is socialmention.com and you will also find it in my OPML (see signature). Beside spam and frequent love/hate messages you won’t find too many real requests.
What I resist to do is to support single users via 1:1 conversation or excessive mail threads. That’s a big NoNo for me and help seeking people should better understand that there is more competence to be found in an open conversation on the TXP forum.
IMHO microblogging is pretty dead when it comes to more complex subjects like CMS. Even in an environment with sophisticated threaded views there is not much action happening. I’d love to see more action in this Textpattern group (or somewhere else) but microblogging in this context is pretty dead.
(And no, I am not willing to support switching this thread towards a forum structure discussion.)
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