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#1 2013-06-12 09:08:04
- Algaris
- Member
- From: England
- Registered: 2006-01-27
- Posts: 548
So long and thanks for all the fish
This isn’t exactly a goodbye but I am going to be around a lot less than usual.
My boss recently decided to undertake a review of our websites and online calendar, both of which are powered by Textpattern.
As a result of this review she decided to outsource the development of these sites. All the design companies she approached had never heard of Textpattern and strongly recommended we switch to either WordPress of Drupal. I fought the case to stay with Textpattern and keep the design in-house but was overruled.
I’d like to say a big thank you to the community and the Devs for all the help and advice you’ve given me over the years. I’d especially like to thank Stef for his wonderful plugins and all the help he gave me with smd_calendar, you were an absolute life saver.
Hopefully I’ll find the time to pop by as I have some small side projects that run on Textpatern. It’s just unfortunate that Textpattern won’t be the main thrust of my work anymore.
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Re: So long and thanks for all the fish
Hi Ross,
You’re welcome. Glad we could be of service.
I was just lamenting less than ten minutes ago that the whole business of web design seems to have been devalued with the prevalence of “websites are so easy with our tool” marketing campaigns. As if throwing software at a problem makes the process instant or somehow magically makes good design.
People who want a website, how much will it cost are surprised when the price is higher than a few bucks. And outsourcing always looks good on paper until there’s a problem and there’s little control over the end result. Popularity wins, meh.
Stay cool anyway. Next time I’m on holiday down in your county I’ll see if I can route the trip past your town and get together for a beer if you’ll have me. Think gaekwad lives only about an hour from you too now. Party!
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
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Re: So long and thanks for all the fish
Hey Ross sorry to see you go be that a ‘staying’ type of go. I guess that your boss will be running back to you when theire new site gets hacked.
Yiannis
——————————
NeMe | hblack.art | EMAP | A Sea change | Toolkit of Care
I do my best editing after I click on the submit button.
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Re: So long and thanks for all the fish
Drupal, meh.
I have to use Drupal for my main client, and while it’s great, it’s also horrible. The content authors also struggle with it because they find it confusing.
Anyway, all the best.
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Re: So long and thanks for all the fish
-:(
(in a way I’m glad to see that I’m not the only to have my skills “outsourced” to some prepackaged thing by my –maybe former– client)
Stay strong.
Where is that emoji for a solar powered submarine when you need it ?
Sand space – admin theme for Textpattern
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Re: So long and thanks for all the fish
Thanks Ross – I’ve found lots of your posts very helpful…. and if I remember, your sites looked and worked great….
Strange decision by your boss, but not uncommon – the sheep factor
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#7 2013-06-15 07:00:59
- milosevic
- Member
- From: Madrid, Spain
- Registered: 2005-09-19
- Posts: 390
Re: So long and thanks for all the fish
I’m sorry Algaris.
At my actual work, the company prefers to pay for a Wordpress development than let me do the job faster and “free” (I’m an employee: fix cost) with Textpattern. There is a reason for that: If one day I leave the company, it is really difficult to find a Textpattern experienced partner in my city (and I will say in my entire country). So I develop sites quickly with txp and, once they are finished, the are just a “live briefing” to port the result to WP: it is a little bit ridiculous but if we think about it perhaps it is our fault because we all do not to promote enough Textpattern?
<txp:rocks/>
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#8 2013-06-18 15:22:03
- Algaris
- Member
- From: England
- Registered: 2006-01-27
- Posts: 548
Re: So long and thanks for all the fish
Well it’s been decided we’re moving the website and calendar to WordPress.
I think the main problem with Textpattern (at least in my boss’ view) is that none of the design houses knew of it, much less how to create a website with it in a couple of months. As she was determined to outsource Texttern was a no-go from the start. She also had a perception of Textpattern being difficult to use, especially for people who are unfamiliar with web design/development. She liked WordPress because it’s widely known, lots of people use it, it’s easy to use and is regularly updated (regular updates=actively supported and future proof).
Bloke wrote:
Stay cool anyway. Next time I’m on holiday down in your county I’ll see if I can route the trip past your town and get together for a beer if you’ll have me. Think gaekwad lives only about an hour from you too now. Party!
Yes please I’d love to meet up with you and buy you a drink. In fact if you can make it a little be further south I’d love to show you the village I live in, just search for Porthleven on Google Maps. You’re right gaekwad does live quite close to me or at least where I work. I really should arrange a meet up with him.
Thanks Tye, I’m glad someone got some use out of my ramblings ;-)
Hopefully I won’t completely disappear as I still have some internal odds and ends running on Textpattern. I also need to finish writing a TXP Tips article I promised a while ago, regarding how I use jmd_CSV to import CSV files into Textpattern.
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Re: So long and thanks for all the fish
Algaris wrote:
I think the main problem with Textpattern (at least in my boss’ view) is that none of the design houses knew of it, much less how to create a website with it in a couple of months. As she was determined to outsource Texttern was a no-go from the start. She also had a perception of Textpattern being difficult to use, especially for people who are unfamiliar with web design/development. She liked WordPress because it’s widely known, lots of people use it, it’s easy to use and is regularly updated (regular updates=actively supported and future proof).
Which is interesting.
A lot of people are aware of WP, that’s true. And it seems that a lot of agencies use WP to create websites for people without actually understanding how the templates are put together.
In my experience, designers/developers who use Textpattern generally tend to create their own designs/templates from scratch and slot in Txp tags as appropriate to generate the dynamic content. WP people tend to stick to off-the-shelf-templates and populate them with a client’s content.
It’s a massive generalisation I know, but it does seem to mean that clients of WP agencies are one (or more) steps removed from the people who actually understand how their website is constructed, which makes breaking out of the standard mould more difficult.
I also find this case study at Smashing Magazine rather horrifying. Scroll down to the “DID WE REALLY NEED A CMS?” section where they state that “a typical page with WordPress uses around 600 to 1,500 queries to load”. Really? 600-1,500 queries per page??!! On a typical site that I create using Textpattern I normally see around 30-40 queries per page. I guess that explains why WP can be such a performance hog on a shared server.
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Re: So long and thanks for all the fish
Agree with pretty much everything Steve said there. WordPress is only going to get heavier too as they compete with Drupal and Joomla to become ‘a platform for the web’.
Meanwhile I’ll be writing clean HTML, sprinkling in some Textpattern tags where appropriate, and having a nice slim fast loading site with no forced CMS code injected into it. That’s future proof enough for me.
Depends on the site though, of course. We’ve had to use Drupal for a very large international site because of the strong multi language functionality it has, which Textpattern doesn’t.
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Re: So long and thanks for all the fish
Algaris a écrit:
She also had a perception of Textpattern being difficult to use, especially for people who are unfamiliar with web design/development.
False! But here, we all know.
As I explained for TXP Magazine (btw, seems to be down), I’m neither a designer, nor a front-end developer and despite this I can build web sites that behave well. I am pretty sure I couldn’t have done what I did with an other CMS because of their rigidity, or at least not as quickly or as well.
Of course, if specific functionalities are needed it takes particular skills in plugin or core development, but no more than elsewhere.
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Re: So long and thanks for all the fish
Porthleven – that the best wave in the UK… you are blessed :)
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