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TXP:CMS growing rapidly
I gave Bert the txpcms domains because textpattern “won the domain name vote”, so to speak. And Bert’s been busy. He’s taken Textpattern, added Bootstrap and quickly made mobile-friendly themes, using them on the sites below.
TXP:CMS links to four sites in the TXP family.
TXP:Themes has a blog and some themes as proof of concept. Includes official TXP themes.
TXP:Tags is a mobile-friendly Tag reference.
TXP:Planet has up-to-date news feeds from several TXP sites.
We Love TXP has also undergone the new theme treatment and is now up-to-date again with some newly added Textpattern sites.
There’s also txpcms.net and txpcms.org and probably others I haven’t discovered yet.
Besides linking to some useful resources, I’m posting here because I think Bert deserves some thanks and appreciation for his energy and enthusiasm, spreading the word about Textpattern and making TXP more user-friendly. Thanks, Bert!
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Re: TXP:CMS growing rapidly
Is that a fork of Textpattern Bert is working on? He said that he’s made his last post on the forums…
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Re: TXP:CMS growing rapidly
Yes, Bert’s very passionate about Textpattern so he’s forking it. It’s going to be interesting!
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Re: TXP:CMS growing rapidly
So is he promoting Textpattern or his fork of Textpattern?
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Re: TXP:CMS growing rapidly
Is it really a fork of Textpattern proper or more of a repackaging of Textpattern – alternate name, website(s), plus additional templates, themes, etc.?
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Re: TXP:CMS growing rapidly
Am I the only one who thinks that creating a new CMS with a name and an icon (hammer/chisel) that is very confusing to users of the real TXP. I don’t see any code for a fork yet.
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Re: TXP:CMS growing rapidly
It doesn’t seem to be a fork, rather a repackaging as @maverick says. I’m not sure what the intention is, but certainly if he is looking to create a new CMS it shouldn’t be with the TXP branding i.e with the hammer/chisel as that would be confusing to say the least.
Ruud, you are mentioned here in case you hadn’t seen.
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Re: TXP:CMS growing rapidly
LOL… that isn’t my linkedin profile he’s linking to.
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Re: TXP:CMS growing rapidly
Bert says it’s a fork and he’s planning code changes but it’s also a repackaging and a re-presentation. If you click on the TXP logos they take you to textpattern.com. He told me he loves Bootstrap and has a stack of themes coming. So, as I see it, new users with few technical skills will have more themes to choose from. Seems the forum don’t want that audience, but Bert does.
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#11 2015-08-20 15:14:41
- GugUser
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- From: Quito (Ecuador)
- Registered: 2007-12-16
- Posts: 1,477
Re: TXP:CMS growing rapidly
It looks like someone needs to catch attention and wants to sow confusion, with the help of others.
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Re: TXP:CMS growing rapidly
I am not trying to sow confusion or help anyone to do it. If Bert wants to put his energies into a CMS more attractive to a certain audience, then I think we should encourage him. More people will be using Textpattern. It’s all good when the heart is in the right place.
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Re: TXP:CMS growing rapidly
Based on the several threads Bert was contributing to, my sense is that he was frustrated with the focus (or lack) on themes, but really as motivated by a frustration when the community didn’t want to modify the name/domains, etc. to break away from Dean’s passive control.
He didn’t want to build his theme business based on a project that could not control its own destiny. He identified a preferred strategy to move forward and became impatient when the rest of the community didn’t move in that direction at that time.
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Re: TXP:CMS growing rapidly
I must say I’m a little confused by all this. When Bert resurfaced, his idea that Themes weren’t actually that hard kicked me into gear. I realised he was right. Aside from all the other stuff I was doing, I’d been putting Themes off because of the fact I’d (wrongly) made the scope too large. He made me realise it was not only doable, but extensible, with humble beginnings (like I’ve done so far) migrating to grander plans that are in progress.
It seems I didn’t code quick enough. Or something, like the whole domain issue.
In my reply I did not belittle the idea of getting rid of Form types. In fact I brought up Ruud’s point that Forms themselves are (functionally) equivalent to Pages and could be dispensed with entirely, if we so desired — assuming we could come up with a neat way in the UI to deal with the fallout. Not that I’d advocate their removal because it creates tonnes of work, in the same way that renaming them from Form to something else creates work for very little real-world benefit at the moment (besides losing the stupid name and maybe creating a little less confusion for new users).
Form types do have some benefits:
- They allow categorisation of reusable blocks. Without this, you have a sea of blocks that then require — as Bert pointed out — prefixing if you wish to group them.
- They permit article Form overrides, which I and others have used in the past to switch out an article to use a different look or different functionality, even if only temporarily.
The problems are:
- Having a fixed list of Types is sometimes a little annoying. I have some code in a tentative branch that allows you to define your own, but I’m not happy with the implementation yet to know if it holds water long term.
- The essential Forms thing is a handy convention in some ways (leaner code, fewer support requests) but at other times it can be maddening that you just can’t delete the damn things. And this would hold over to each new Theme too, which is a pain.
Addressing these issues is something I’d like to do at some point. I just don’t know exactly how best to do it yet so I was waiting until the Themes idea was proven by more people (albeit with a few UI niggles at the mo) before wasting time moving forward on something that turned out to be fundamentally flawed.
My only argument with Bert’s rationale for removing Form types was his assertion that “I have to preface each form with the Theme name” under the new Themes branch. That’s not true. Pages, Forms and Stylesheets are entirely separate entities in each Theme. Switch to a different Theme for editing, and you get an entirely different set of Pages, Forms (+ types) and Stylesheets to work with. No prefixing necessary. He did not respond to my question to clarify his point. I thought he was just busy working magic with making themes or tweaking his cool plugin.
I took his points about copying between Themes. It’s part of the plan, once I — or someone else — can figure out a decent and intuitive system to do it. Probably requires a bit of refactoring of the UI so I was kinda hoping that the admin-layout-update branch would be merged in fairly soon so I don’t have to do the work twice.
Repurposing Form types as a Theme switch has nothing to do with not desiring to make changes. It’s simply entirely unnecessary in the current implementation because there’s already a mechanism to keep them separate, so the Types don’t need to be removed or altered. They work exactly as they did, with the added bonus that they can be packaged up and distributed as a set along with other elements of a Theme.
Ultimately, well, I dunno. Still confused. But it doesn’t change the fact that Bert convinced me to put the code down, using his original plan and his definition of scope of what each layer of the onion should be. If that’s not listening, in an effort to make things better that are long overdue to be improved, then I guess I don’t know what is.
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Re: TXP:CMS growing rapidly
Bloke
If one tracks Bert’s trajectory from his return to his most recent/final(?) post, it was rather intense.
Some really good stuff, plus some excellent energy – both from him and a number of others. If anything, perhaps an overwhelming amount of energy all of a sudden, at one time, hitting documents, themes, Txp Magazine, future directions, Txp domain ownership, hosting options, the new possible Txp Association, the next version of Textpattern, and so on.
All good things. All things that need to be addressed. But not everything could be addressed at the same time.
My perception was that Bert was frustrated at several turns, the themes being one of them but not the only one.
I believe there is a thread on domain / project ownership where Bert gave his first indication that he would leave unless steps were taken to secure the future of the project. Security seemed to mean 1) Dean hands over the keys to the kingdom or 2) Immediate plans were made to change the project name, hosting, and domains.
I don’t recall if this was the same thread, but Phil was part of one conversation, and indicated that while there were contingencies in case of a worst case scenario, we wouldn’t makes those changes unless we had to do so. That seemed to be the trigger: signing off
So, fwiw, I don’t think it was truly your response on forms and themes.
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