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Re: Expressionengine
Either I am missing something, or you are.
Ha, I thought the same thing. Didn’t see Els taking things personally.
And ibob’s points are interesting but…ibob, has your business ever been hurt by proprietary software? I used to use a proprietary package that was sold to other management twice and finally left unsupported while it gathered bugs. I could have modified it myself but the license was a major problem there. I stopped using it when the new owner started asking me to buy telephones (?) from their online store. And this was an extremely valuable content management tool.
Just before this happened I bought an EE license but soon decided to let it gather dust. Without full control over the technology or how & where it’s used, I’d have been an idiot to ask for another lesson like the previous one. Even though EE has some extremely nice features and even though it is commercially supported.
When I came across Textpattern, I wasn’t convinced it was worth using until I heard about one company that used it “except it’s literally all just PHP in there now, no TXP tags anymore.” Fine, so that means it evolved into something they still use. This is what I wanted to find—an extreme case—but it’s not very intimidating to me. I would probably look at PHP frameworks at that point, but TXP5 is moving in that direction anyway.
Software always expands like a gas, and TXP seems to be expanding in one sustainable direction (TXP5 development) while remaining expandable in another wide-open (txp:php, smd_query, smd_xml, etc.) direction.
That combined with a lightweight footprint is about all you could ask for. Thank goodness it’s not an enterprise CMS.
Now for people who don’t care to learn PHP or SQL, TXP tags are still very powerful but the plugin maintainability concern remains. And for some (you?) the plugin availability concern remains.
Frankly, I find it pointless to speculate about what it’s like to be in that group of people, and attempt to point out its struggles. From what little I can tell, these are not idiots who are “stuck” with TXP. Like you they are smart web designers who often also know how to use EE or Shopify or whatever extra stuff they need to. Software use is a personal choice and wide-open use case imaginations are usually just that.
It’s easy to try to speak to the entire developer community as if they’re one entity, or (Uli) assume that money would be an effective motivator for grand expeditions into software development. I’ve just never seen one of these methods work consistently.
For now Textpattern is an effective business tool for a lot of people.
Last edited by maruchan (2011-11-18 01:12:01)
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#26 2011-11-18 01:28:14
- uli
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Re: Expressionengine
maruchan wrote:
It’s easy to […] assume that money would be an effective motivator for grand expeditions into software development
Not exactly a motivator.
Subtract from a developers schedule the promo time, the documentation time, the site maintenance time, the support/trouble shooting time etc., all jobs that could be done by paid staff (oh yes, here we find the term “motivation” again, amongst other things), and you see the holes that a dev could fill with real dev work.
In bad weather I never leave home without wet_plugout, smd_where_used and adi_form_links
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Re: Expressionengine
and you see the holes that a dev could fill with real dev work.
I’ve seen that work, too. Just not consistently. I’d be interested to know what sort of formula would be required in Textpattern’s case. Some configuration like Google Summer of Code? Or does it just take a new, frameworky TXP5 to attract all kinds of bounty-hunting developers? Or a non-profit T e x t p a t t e r n F o u n d a t i o n to run fundraising efforts and pay for a concerted development push? Love to find out.
Last edited by maruchan (2011-11-18 05:19:04)
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