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Kickstarter-esque project for Textpattern 4.6
Hi, developers (and everyone else).
Forgive me if this is a topic that’s been covered before, or something that’s likely to open a huge can of worms.
Is there scope for a Kickstarter-style project for Textpattern 4.6? Specifically, money is gathered together to fund one or more developers to blitz the outstanding to-do list and perhaps make one or more of those oft-mentioned and nice-to-have features a reality.
Frankly, I am not able to assist with the development of Textpattern at a code level, but I will be able to throw some money at a Kickstarter to assist Robert, Stef, Jukka and Phil to spend an additional chunk of time at the Textpattern coalface without the distraction of day jobs etc.
The Christmas/end-of-year fund is great. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting this should be a replacement. Equally, I am absolutely not tying a Kickstarter project to ransom the 4.6 release in any fashion. Finally, if you’re named above, please try and forget modesty you have for the project and think about whether you’d be able to undertake something like this; obviously if it’s not feasible then it’s a NonStarter rather than Kickstarter. Ha ha, etc.
It’s an idea I had. I’d appreciate your feedback if you’re able to give some.
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Re: Kickstarter-esque project for Textpattern 4.6
Took me a while to find the donate button in the footer on the Textpattern site…
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Re: Kickstarter-esque project for Textpattern 4.6
Speaking personally, the money (whilst nice!) would not make a difference for me. I fit work on Textpattern around my day job running a design agency, so more money doesn’t equal more time available from me.
However, what does encourage me to work on the project more is when others are also working on it, so if one of the other devs feels extra money paid to them would spearhead a fairly large chunk of progress then I’d certainly back that up with my own input too, as much as possible.
In an ideal world I’d love to work full time on Textpattern but that’s impossible without a salaried business model in place. Would be interested to hear everyone else’s opinion though. Kickstarter is something I’ve mulled over in the past.
Cheers,
Phil
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Re: Kickstarter-esque project for Textpattern 4.6
It indeed would be great if we could do Textpattern as a full time job…
…but Kickstarter may not make that possible; it’s after all one time ground funding round. We would have to raise quite a lot to keep guys fed for even just a year — not to stack on money, but take day jobs away, and salaries do kinda add up. We would really have to have sustainable business model of some kind, which I wouldn’t be against of (I would be all for doing some type of monetizable work to fund the project, its development and us).
Last edited by Gocom (2013-08-21 01:19:51)
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Re: Kickstarter-esque project for Textpattern 4.6
Like Phil, the money side of things sadly doesn’t equate to free time for me either. I’m lucky at the moment that my day job requires me to develop and run a suite of sites that all need specialist plugins which usually end up as smd_something for everybody else to enjoy. In effect, my day job funds plugin development to some degree.
In terms of core, at the moment I’m the rank outsider because my coding skillz aren’t up to those of the others. I’m a hacker-esque procedural fossil trying to fit into the fast-paced world of collaborative coding and codepath optimization tools like Travis, Composer, PHPUnit, et al without the spare time or brain cells to learn any of them properly. And my old plugin code, while functional, is actually quite crap, which is a maintenance headache.
The upshot is that, even if there was some funding initiative, I’d feel like a fraud taking people’s hard earned cash when I can’t contribute to development in any meaningful way without putting in some hard graft first to bring myself up to a decent standard of coding.
</dawsons_lament>
Last edited by Bloke (2013-08-21 19:29:58)
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
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Re: Kickstarter-esque project for Textpattern 4.6
Bloke wrote:
In terms of core, at the moment I’m the rank outsider because my coding skillz aren’t up to those of the others.
Which makes me wonder whether the increasing adoption of “modern” development methods and language constructs in the 4.6 development cycle and a more complex code base is establishing a too high entry barrier for new contributors or plugin authors.
What do you think?
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Re: Kickstarter-esque project for Textpattern 4.6
wet wrote:
What do you think?
I don’t see why it would. Especially plugins authors, since they don’t have to use any of that stuff.
But I’ve seen complaints about that Textpattern does not have anything on frameworks and sports procedural core, which makes rabid development impossible. I’ve seen it from both past plugin developers and new Textpattern users that don’t even do plugins. I have to agree.
Procedural codebase itself is messy and very limiting.
Last edited by Gocom (2013-08-22 11:36:18)
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Re: Kickstarter-esque project for Textpattern 4.6
As long as the modern code is commented/documented well, I don’t see it being a problem (albeit with my very limited knowledge of PHP) .
It’s probably more of a problem to plugin developers/contributors that large portions of the legacy code had no commenting at all. I’ve certainly found it a whole lot easier working out what’s what in the codebase since the docblock comments have started to be introduced.
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Re: Kickstarter-esque project for Textpattern 4.6
I’ve just got ‘containers’ to the core, so it should definitely make it easier for end-developers to access the more ‘modern’ classes. It’s almost like calling your procedural function, expect that you can chain. E.g.
echo Txp::get('TypeString', ' Hello World! ')->trim()->replace(' ', '&')->lower()->html();Now if the container just had views and no visible factory. But PHP 5.2.0 doesn’t have neither lambdas, static binding nor closures. The most advanced stuff I can use are interface signaling and some reflection. So, factories and interface templates it is.
In PHP 5.3.0 the above could look like:
echo String::set(' Hello World! ')->trim()->replace(' ', '&')->lower()->html();Since it has namespaces, their aliases and static binds. We basically could accept the first method, any method of the class that would normally return an object of itself, as static, which cuts down the length.
If the TypeString looks freaky, like you don’t have no idea how it works, let me tell you, it isn’t anything special. The methods are merely chainable (return the instance itself) and __toString() returns the end results. PHP invokes the method each time when an object instance is casted to a string.
Last edited by Gocom (2013-08-22 13:21:22)
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Re: Kickstarter-esque project for Textpattern 4.6
As long as these exciting novelties keep Textpattern lightweight and fast, I wouldn’t mind spending hours to assimilate new concepts. The documentation and examples are crucial, of course.
Back to the OP, the money could pay the referencing, advertisement, and other necessary evils.
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Re: Kickstarter-esque project for Textpattern 4.6
How about mini campaigns to sponsor feature implementation. One omnibus kickstarteresque fundraising effort is less focused, and the benefits are less measurable.
With mini pledge drives, people would be funding what they need/want most, and have a sense of ownership, i.e. “I helped make X feature of TXP possible”. Further, I would think devs could size up a feature and see the reward in the immediate future, i.e. “I could have that done in a week and buy myself that hi-tech gadget I’ve always wanted.”
I understand that these features will need to be weighed by the core devs and implemented in a way that integrates gracefully and harmoniously with core. I also understand that peeps like Jukka are seriously hardening TXP and while that is not sexy it is very much needed, but hardly anyone is going to say, I’ll sponsor more secure user authentication.
Anyway mini-drives? Thoughts?
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Re: Kickstarter-esque project for Textpattern 4.6
mrdale wrote:
Anyway mini-drives? Thoughts?
Yup. Take my money.
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