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Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?
philwareham wrote #283537:
Current team is:
Robert (wet)
Stef (bloke)
Phil (me)
Jukka (Gocom)
Huge thanks to the very much volunteer team. Textpattern has gone through periods of limited development before, and then re-emerged with new strength.
When TXP development gets scarce I’ll admit to checking out the CMS alternatives. I’ve realllyyyy tried to like Drupal, but its obtuse logic sends me screaming. TXP’s small code base, zippy performance and flexibility (thank you plugin authors) keeps me in the fold.
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Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?
towndock wrote #283543:
When TXP development gets scarce I’ll admit to checking out the CMS alternatives. I’ve realllyyyy tried to like Drupal, but its obtuse logic sends me screaming. TXP’s small code base, zippy performance and flexibility (thank you plugin authors) keeps me in the fold.
Out of curiosity, which CMS alternatives did you and others try? I saw October but didn’t try it out. Actually its good to check on alternatives even if its only to get an idea of where Textpattern currently stands amongst the competition.
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#18 2014-09-08 06:56:42
- candyman
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- From: Italy
- Registered: 2006-08-08
- Posts: 684
Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?
October looks very promising.
What type of features shall we find with TXP 5?
Last edited by candyman (2014-09-08 07:12:55)
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Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?
jstubbs wrote #283545:
Out of curiosity, which CMS alternatives did you and others try? I saw October but didn’t try it out. Actually its good to check on alternatives even if its only to get an idea of where Textpattern currently stands amongst the competition.
My last few projects have used ExpressionEngine because I needed something bigger and more capable than Textpattern, specifically things like: unlimited custom fields, integrated discussion forum, complex membership requirements, ecommerce, etc.
Going forward though, and even for smaller projects, I’m now looking at CraftCMS. It’s commercial (well, there is a limited free version) but is extremely powerful and flexible and is under very rapid continuous development (averaging 1.6 updates a week since it was launched 18 months ago). The Matrix field type makes creating visually complex layouts straightforward. The control panel is gorgeous and offers live previewing of new entries alongside the content editor. The flexibility of different types of sections: singles, structures and channels, together with the concept of unlimited custom fields and entry types, makes it suitable for almost every conceivable site. It uses Twig for its templating language, which adds a lot of flexibility and power to the templates. The professional version supports multi-langauge sites and there are over 150 plugins (free and commercial) available. It really does look hard to beat.
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#20 2014-09-08 10:30:45
- candyman
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- From: Italy
- Registered: 2006-08-08
- Posts: 684
Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?
Matrix field type is great.
I hope TXP5 will have something similar in its typical small footprint that, besides its community, is its strong point.
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Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?
jstubbs wrote #283545:
Out of curiosity, which CMS alternatives did you and others try? I saw October but didn’t try it out. Actually its good to check on alternatives even if its only to get an idea of where Textpattern currently stands amongst the competition.
There are of course dozens, perhaps hundreds of CMS options. I haven’t really checked out ones that go after the small/simple footprint as I have no prob with TXP with this.
Where TXP hasn’t been strong in my work is Ecommerce and site membership. In one recent site I used (forgive me) Wordpress due to the great & easily available Ecommerce options. It worked. Drupal’s site membership strengths have me interested for another project, but its needless/obtuse complexity (to my eye) has me reluctant. I even attended a DrupalCamp to better understand it. On one hand, Drupal has an energy & involvement that TXP can’t match. On the other hand, anything I’ve tried to do in Drupal was much slower & oddly less searchable than in TXP.
I’ve also downloaded & demo tested ExpressionEngine & ModX. Liked both, but not enough to change my main choice.
TXP remains sweet to use, and easy to adapt to many situations either through plugins or the simple way TXP can make a call to PHP.
Last edited by towndock (2014-09-08 16:15:06)
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Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?
candyman wrote #283556:
October looks very promising.
October looks a lot like the one I mentioned earlier – Grav. Both use TWIG and are File-based. But call me old-fashioned – I started using a CMS so I could avoid uploading individual files to a server and I don’t miss Microsoft Frontpage.
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Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?
wet wrote #283494:
Speaking for myself: I have no intentions to drop Textpattern as my CMS of choice.
Bloke wrote #283497:
…don’t give up. I’m not!
As far as I’m concerned — because I’m kind of a wreckless/careless sort anyway — that’s all I needed to hear. If Robert and Stef are still onboard, then I’m still onboard and using Textpattern.
Gocom is probably fighting volcanos, or something, but I am wondering why the fabled .com redesign hasn’t emerged, at least. Let me guess… content, not design, is holding up the progress. (That wouldn’t be a surprise to me.)
And can’t we have a v 5.5.5 [4.5.6 is what I meant] that at least provides the Markdown syntax, and figure fixes in the images forms, etc. Little things like this are not so insignificant to wait 20 years for the big 4.6 (I’m might die of a heart attack first). Fucking release, already. This shows that there is a beating heart, after all.
P.S. Can someone tell me how to do those textile links where the link text is the actual URL and you don’t have to repeat the URL in the URL designator? Know what I mean?
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Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?
Destry wrote #283569:
P.S. Can someone tell me how to do those textile links where the link text is the actual URL and you don’t have to repeat the URL in the URL designator? Know what I mean?
You mean:
"$":http://www.example.comLast edited by douglgm (2014-09-08 16:52:05)
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Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?
Yes, exactly. Thank you, douglgm!
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Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?
Btw, Bloke… I hope that comment about “health” isn’t something I need to be overly concerned about.
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Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?
“TXP 4.5” 2 years old.
And during those two years, the dev team has not taken much time to inform the user community in the development of the next release.
It took some members regularly ask questions to the devs via this forum to have some information about the future of their favorite CMS.
The official weblog is underexploited.
I understand that communication takes time and our volunteer team has more pressing things to deal with.
I think it’s a negative factor for TXP.
I feel TXP is now used primarily by amateurs or freelance web designer.
Our CMS does not have to be supported by web agencies sufficiently.
For an agency chooses a tool, it must have a secure medium / long-term vision of its evolution. TXP, by his lack of communication, does not inspire confidence.
It is a pity, because a stronger support of the profession would probably recruit more developer in the project and create a better dynamic.
I’d like to see better communication to the Textpattern roadmap.
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Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?
I hope blokes health is in tip top condition too
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Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?
Bloke’s health is fine. Nothing a little sleep can’t fix :-)
OctoberCMS looks interesting. Anything sensible we can pilfer pay homage to in Textpattern? Or is it, as michaelkpate says, a very different workflow? Twig is good, although not as familiar to Txp users as employing tags to do the same thing (e.g. plugins for conditionals and loops, via Forms).
Regarding communication, yes I’m crap. I know this and have to accept it. All I can do is apologise (again). If anyone wants to step up and be communications secretary in charge of content, raise your hand and we’ll fold you into the loop no problem.
An intermediate release is awaiting a couple of security updates which I might be able to do if I can dig out my login to access the disclosures, but everyone here knows I suck at security so unless it’s a simple patch, we’ll need someone cleverer than me on the case.
Roadmap roadmap roadmap. I don’t have one, nobody does afaik. The internals of Txp have changed fundamentally (for the better) but we’re not there yet. We could release 4.6 without it being fully migrated under the hood. It already has a lot of new stuff in there and it’s stable enough for production use, imo. The Issues list is a good place to start if you want to see what’s still left to do.
However, one of the major stumbling blocks is the fact we’re using MySQL exclusively and PHP has deprecated the mysql_* calls (see Issue 426). That means we’re on borrowed time. Moving to PDO is the way forward, imo, and some of the work is swapping out the calls to use the newer syntax in txplib_db.php.
But there are other things such as the way we build queries. When calling our getRows() function, for example, an entire query is submitted (e.g. "SELECT col1, col2 FROM table WHERE col3='".doSlash(squid)."'"). PDO does things differently for better security, so all such calls need to be refactored to use parameterized attributes: these don’t require escaping with doSlash() because PDO does that for us. That’s quite a bit of work on its own, but alongside this we could do with some newer aggregate methods to help us build such queries better.
A lot of this work has been done in ORM wrappers and there are many available for free which we could adopt. But they all come with a price: size/speed, and therefore bloat. And also having to keep up with the fact that at every major revision of the ORM they change the damn API and we’d have to rewrite everything (anyone who’s tried to upgrade Foundation knows the hoops to jump through with every major release). Since we try to be anti-bloat, incorporating a heavy database framework seems like a bad move, even though it’d largely be a drop-in-and-go solution at first.
So we’re faced with either reinventing a wheel (albeit a lightweight one) for our own purposes, or using a heavy off-the-shelf articulated truck wheel. Or, perhaps, find a good lightweight one – though these often start out with good intentions and evolve into heavy behemoths over time. The exception to date is my favourite Fat Free Framework which has an excellent and lightweight ORM built in. Txp could probably be rewritten in F3 with about 20 lines of code :-p But adopting F3, or similar, means more widespread changes would need to be made to Txp’s codebase and it’s probably overkill just to get access to the ORM.
Hopefully that small example shows the complexity of what we’re facing. And it’s not the only thing we need to address fairly soon. Nobody’s really focusing on that side of things at the moment (Nate Nolting did start a patch for us, but I don’t know how far he got with it). We probably should stop burying our heads in the sand and hoping it’ll go away, because it won’t. Someone needs to make a decision one way or the other and it needs some coding effort (uhhh, anyone?) That sort of thing is not my core competence so if I code it, it’ll work but it’ll be cack to maintain. And it’ll probably take me fifteen years at my current rate of working.
Anyway, once that and a few other bits and bobs are out of the way, we can probably release 4.6.0 and then maybe roll unlimited CFs into a point release, or into a much shorter 4.7.x release cycle. Or if I can lick it soon and it coincides with the PDO stuff, it can go in 4.6.0. It’ll depend on how many people are willing to test it.
In summary, I know things look quiet. But please don’t equate silence with death.
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Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?
I’d like to get a 4.6 release out sooner rather than later – there’s really nice stuff in there that’s been written for years and would benefit our users. In fact I’d rather release ongoing updates more often instead of major releases years apart (but not often enough to be irritating to devs/users).
That being said, I’ve started moving admin UI around recently so it can’t happen right now anyway (I’m doing that on GitHub though, because Google Code is dead to me). There’s no reason I can think of why the 4.5.7 release can’t happen in the interim, I thought we’d signed that one of to go out?
As for under the-hood stuff, that’s not my area – I understand we are halfway through a major refactor of the underlying code and Jukka wanted it all further along before a release, but I haven’t heard from Jukka in quite a while.
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