Expressionengine

uli · 2011-11-17 21:41:06

Els wrote:

I just don’t quite see the use of you posting it here.

I had quite similar feelings yesterday, Els. Toaday I’m glad about the dialog we’re having.

@ibob I don’t know how EE handles customer wishes or whether it has everything on board right from the beginning.
In an open source project it depends on being a member of the community if you want the information and the code’s capabilities you need. Take part in the discussion. How many of our plugin authors have their eyes on the forum and code for you in the wink of an eye if you speak out what you think’d be cool! Look at how adi_form_links was born or wet_plugout. sed_cleaner was a project that Steve almost urged us to improve by uttering wishes. Stef is known for implementing the slightest echoes from the forum, redbot helps where he can, just to name a few.

ibob wrote:

One reason is the looks

There are really great backend themes. Many seem to like Vitraux, an absolute pro skin. I myself prefer my slightly altered variant of the fresh TXP family dress Hive with a full width blue-grey header.

but there are also some usability issues like ordering pages / articles

stm_article_order

customfields is like a green fruit

glz_custom_fields (10$, the only TXP plugin I had to pay for ever)

I can’t show easily what pages / articles I have under section x (search is just silly)

adi_page_tab shows you which sections are using the page that’s currently viewed. Searching/browsing is in the work right now at Stef (who asked for ideas from the community), mergering his smd_browse_by with tjh_article_listfilter

urls are pain..

Fully valid. And the only tool that’d help here at the moment, gbp_permanent_links is undocumented. Big ToDo!

and overall when in project I constantly have in mind that “holy cr*p this will be pain in the ass for customer”.

Admitted that I had similar thoughts, but only for editing images.

And from dev’s view one thing that I especially love with EE2: I can use files instead of textboxes to create templates (txp:pages).. I think you all know how messy it is to read TXP:tags from those.

Either you use itsalltext (FF extension to open textareas in your favorite texteditor) or you install cnk_versioning and do it exactly like that!

And the point that you’d need to prepare ach and every installation with all these extra mini steps is invalid with the creation of sed_cleaner I already mentioned above.

Probably not each of these solutions would suit your needs 100% but I think it’s more clear now what I said in the beginning: be a forum member and you know where to look for things.

els · 2011-11-17 21:48:41

ibob wrote:

Els, check out the first post:

“… wanted to know who ever uses it? any opinions? he is better than txp? harder to be there all arranged, for example for a designer?”

Yes of course, if Katalonian posted those questions yesterday or last week, your post would have made totally sense. But I wonder if he is still waiting for replies after a year and a half…

Edit: but that’s just my impression, of course you are welcome to post whatever you want :)

Last edited by els (2011-11-17 21:50:11)

els · 2011-11-17 21:52:56

uli, didn’t ibob say he didn’t like plugins? ;)

ibob wrote:

But I will definitely stop by from time to time to see what’s going on.

We appreciate that!

philwareham · 2011-11-17 21:58:38

Regarding the whole aesthetics thing, a new admin-side will definitely happen, it’s just that we have day jobs too. This being an open source project you are quite welcome to contribute directly to Textpattern if there’s something you don’t like or think is unsatisfactory. / rant over

uli · 2011-11-17 22:04:15

Els, ibob said he changed allegiance already, and to be candid, I’m not only posting this for him, this topic will be read by many more from outside or by likeminded community members, and leaving his opinion unanswered isn’t good for TXP’s karma :)

Last edited by uli (2011-11-17 22:21:46)

ibob · 2011-11-17 23:02:07

@uli exactly, google search is our friend. I was having a break from coding and just came to my mind if someone have had same kind of feelings.. so I did google search and eventually ended up in this post. So I wrote what I had in my mind.

Thank you uli for plugin tips. I’ve done some quite big textpattern projects so most of those plugins were familliar but there were also some new stuff. However these sites end up usually so many plugins from so many authors that I just have to cross my fingers that there will be no major security issues or new version of txp won’t break every single plugin I have.

I totally understand that this is a open source project and there’s not so much time for this project. If there was a side-business with this like wp, ee2, magento-style or something.. things might be different. But without that business-side there should be way for developers to commit those plugin functionalities to txp core features.. ofc that would require alot of things like mvc-pattern, gui library etc.

@els, I dont quite understand why you are taking this so personally. I’ve sold/done lot of TXP sites and I’ve kept lot of TXP training days for clients and gained a lot of feedback from them as well. So maybe there might be something that you could use to make TXP more popular and useful? I’ve seen lot of “acts” to vote this over WP or whatever but instead of actually doing something about it I see just ignorance when it comes to comparing some other system. In business world this would immediate bankrupt.

philwareham · 2011-11-17 23:11:55

I’m actually in agreement with ibob that commits from other contributors should be more welcomed. Projects such as html5 boilerplate on GitHub has a very active set of contributors giving patches and still maintain quality control from the core devs. But then again, I’m not a developer so maybe I’m taking a simplified view of it.

maniqui · 2011-11-17 23:35:34

This nice discussion reminded me that Textpattern is a wabi-sabi (well, concept probably applicable to other CMSs out there… or not).

From time to time, I also have my gripes with TXP.
That said, until other common CMSs (and their communities) don’t have stuff as crazy as the smd_ man-machine or the TXP tags-in-tags parser, I don’t think I’ll be able to consider them seriously. :D

I appreciate ibob’s feedback to TXP community, and it re-triggered some soft alarms on the back of my head (“You should keep learning new stuff, maybe peek a little into other CMS, go wild, etc”).

Also, uli’s replies to keep the thread on topic & guide future readers are really appreciated too.

@Queen Els, c’mon, that’s not your style! :)

els · 2011-11-18 00:07:06

ibob wrote:

@els, I dont quite understand why you are taking this so personally.

maniqui wrote:

@Queen Els, c’mon, that’s not your style! :)

?? Either I am missing something, or you are. Never mind, I’ll leave you to it ;)

maruchan · 2011-11-18 01:05:14

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)

uli · 2011-11-18 01:28:14

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.

maruchan · 2011-11-18 05:18:55

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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#16 2011-11-17 21:41:06

Re: Expressionengine

#17 2011-11-17 21:48:41

Re: Expressionengine

#18 2011-11-17 21:52:56

Re: Expressionengine

#19 2011-11-17 21:58:38

Re: Expressionengine

#20 2011-11-17 22:04:15

Re: Expressionengine

#21 2011-11-17 23:02:07

Re: Expressionengine

#22 2011-11-17 23:11:55

Re: Expressionengine

#23 2011-11-17 23:35:34

Re: Expressionengine

#24 2011-11-18 00:07:06

Re: Expressionengine

#25 2011-11-18 01:05:14

Re: Expressionengine

#26 2011-11-18 01:28:14

Re: Expressionengine

#27 2011-11-18 05:18:55

Re: Expressionengine

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