Is the development of Textpattern at the end?

candyman · 2015-10-08 19:25:36

Into another thread, Steve told that:

springworks wrote #295467:

I don’t really do any Textpattern development any more […] check back here every now and again to see what’s going on

… and I see from his portfolio some creations made with Craft. So I’m curious and I ask him if and where he found advantages using this CMS. I bumped this thread because someone talked about a possible txp version of the craft matrix.

Last edited by candyman (2015-10-08 19:27:55)

bici · 2015-10-08 19:37:00

candyman wrote #295504:

Into another thread, Steve told that:

… and I see from his portfolio some creations made with Craft. So I’m curious and I ask him if and where he found advantages using this CMS. I bumped this thread because someone talked about a possible txp version of the craft matrix.

Custom Fields +1

michaelkpate · 2015-10-08 19:58:43

CraftCMS is built by Brandon Kelly and his team over at Pixel & Tonic. P&T was one of the most well known Expressionengine Addon development teams, with some of the most famous addons being, WYGWAM, ASSETS and MATRIX. – Choosing CraftCMS

hcgtv · 2015-10-08 20:35:03

candyman wrote #295504:

Into another thread, Steve told that:

… and I see from his portfolio some creations made with Craft. So I’m curious and I ask him if and where he found advantages using this CMS. I bumped this thread because someone talked about a possible txp version of the craft matrix.

We’re all heading in the same direction, just calling it by another name.

The Matrix is just Forms in the Textpattern world, reusable snippets of code or text.

What sets them apart is that admin side, something to shoot for.

But I prefer Textpattern tags than their way of doing things. Template tags blend in, while their Craft coding stands out from plain HTML.

Destry · 2015-10-09 08:19:15

kno wrote #285897:

The most important change in my view would be to take the users more into account … the authors in terms of back-end usability.

Yep.¹

But it’s not being ignored, exactly, it’s just not easy with no money. Not that software development, brand design/recognition, or content strategy is easy, per se, but with user research the logistics are different. There’s no short-form version that allows working alone in a cave. Someone has to reach out to the users — engage with them, ask them questions, and do follow-up — and nobody here would have the time, interest, or ambition to do that without compatible funds for the effort (and pocket). I have done usability testing before, and there’s a lot of pre-testing work that needs done alone, before you even sit down with your representative subsample of users. And then there’s the post analysis and presentation of the intel, and hoping anyone acts upon it. That kind of work needs compensation.

The most we can hope for, and what I have seen on rare occasions, especially coming from Jakob, is someone from the forum’s 1% reporting back about what their clients say after website hand-offs. I’ve had clients give me a few “negative” comments about Txp, meaning there were things they didn’t find easy to do, or intuitive; often the typical stuff we already know is weak (e.g., image handling) or is unclear (e.g, “Forms”), but sometimes new perspectives too regarding the publishing flow and whatnot. I’ve mentioned these from time to time, but its all lost in the bog now.

One problem with that, beside it not being real user research (only better than nothing), is that it’s reported to this forum where it’s then promptly forgotten about and lost over time. The forum is a nice community spit can, but it’s too often used for everything. For instance, the forum is still the best place for finding and learning about plugins (a bit mind-boggling), and a forum thread usually appears over a blog post, which would otherwise be 100x better for project visibility… These kinds of things have been pointed out again and again but it never really changes anything. The forum is like the crack house. Due to this tendency (since Txp’s beginning), good initiatives brought up here only get half-baked before sinking away again into the bog’s maw.

So, with respect to “user research”, there would ideally be a different place/process setup and designated for Txp web providers like Jakob to report client feedback to; where it’s itemized, organizable, and can be mapped to repo milestones. That in itself takes some thinking about. But then it takes commitment from devs to shape a development plan with that intel in mind. I can only trust they might if they had the intel to begin with — the numbers to show that, yeah, thing A and bobble B are issues, and people hate them. Those are the real priorities, not what the 1% in the forum thinks.

But lets not undermine the forum — or the 1% — entirely. After all, something is better than nothing, and a few of us have always been impassioned. This forum is often akin to one of politics, like the House of Lords or the European Parliament, and some like myself (case in point here) can get long-winded. But such arguments are important if done right; based on facts, industry conventions, and historical reference. They’e needed on behalf of the end users we never hear from. They’re needed in order for core developers to do anything at all. The key, in terms of progress, is to argue for the right and sensible things.

Another strategy, when no formal processes for user research are in place, is to tackle content, build the supporting assets (e.g., style guides), and work with designers to map it all with brand identity. Doing that addresses user experience problems from a different angle — customer touchpoints with the project (btw, great article here). Not just the CMS, but Textpattern’s whole public presence. It’s called “service design” in the wild, and when these kinds of things are addressed, they can reveal similar issues that direct user testing on the product would uncover, though certainly not all.

For example, I’m rewriting user documentation, and taking deep dives into the nuances of the application to do it. This often brings things to light that I report back to this forum for discussion and debate (when it concerns more than just a GitHub issue). Otherwise these things never get properly addressed, or against such an important artifact of customer experience — user docs. The overlap between documentation and application is great. There’s the functionality, of course, but there’s also the UI elements, and here it should be obvious where things like style guides play an important role, and where people in this community can help make the product better — by providing input on the style guides and following them. Any plugin developers here? ;)

There are other similar ‘inside’ projects that contribute to customer experience the same way: The efforts on Textpacks. The (stalled) efforts on a plugin repo. The brand-harmonization of project platforms (and “family” real estate). A newsletter. Use of social media. And so forth. Some of these things are being addressed, others not so much, but there’s only so many people working on them and only so much time available from those who are. Textpattern needs a lot of money to pay for full-time attention, or a lot more quality volunteers, or maybe some mix of both. There’s no fourth option.

But yeah, meaningful user research. It’s importance can not be overstated, and something is better than nothing.

¹ As usual, I’m not really addressing Kno here, but speaking to the general assembly.

springworks · 2015-10-09 11:51:13

candyman wrote #295504:

Into another thread, Steve told that:

… and I see from his portfolio some creations made with Craft. So I’m curious and I ask him if and where he found advantages using this CMS. I bumped this thread because someone talked about a possible txp version of the craft matrix.

Craft is a very attractive CMS to work with on many different levels:

It is completely content focussed. It supports unlimited custom fields which enable you to build a content model for a site that exactly matches the needs of that site. No more sticking everything into one big body field and working around the limitations of up to 10 extra text fields site wide.

The Matrix field is incredibly powerful and enables you to build rich modular content layouts with ease. It’s not about reusable code blocks that Bert alluded to above, it’s about reusable content blocks. Watch the video on the Craft matrix page to see how it works.

Live preview is amazing and a great feature for clients. It gives you a split screen editing capability with a live view of how your updates affect the front end of the site as you type.

The different section types (singles, structures and channels) make building different types of sites quick and easy. Within each section type, you can also define different entry types (think of them as similar to being able to make different types of posts within a single stream of content like Tumblr), which give you even more flexibility.

Everything in Craft can have custom fields applied to it: entries in sections, categories, tags, users, assets (images, files, etc.), globals, etc.

Craft has a powerful relationship engine which allows you to relate anything with anything else. This allows you to build very complex models of inter-related content and follow the relationships to output content as you need to in your templates.

The Twig templating language is extremely powerful and enables you to build modular reusable templates following a DRY (do not repeat yourself) methodology. Twig is almost a programming language in itself, with support for variable, looping, conditionals, macros, includes, etc. as well as basic text and array manipulation.

Craft has complex multi-user and multi-language support built-in natively (Pro version). The powerful and granular permissions and user group functionality enable you to build large community membership sites with ease.

The documentation is excellent and includes a full class reference of the source code, which is very helpful when writing your own plugins.

The user-experience for both content creators, content managers and developers is very nice.

There is a very active and knowledgeable user community, both on Craft’s own community Slack channel and also on the Craft Stack Exchange site.

There’s more coming too, including a first-party ecommerce plugin (due by the end of this year) and a built-in, curated, plugin store (so you can browse, buy and install plugins from the control panel).

Yes, for most sites, Craft is a commercial product and there is a licence fee ($199 for Craft Client and $299 for Craft Pro). For the projects I work on, these fees are easily justifiable. The development time saved and extra power and flexibility that Craft gives me is well worth it.

candyman · 2015-10-09 12:14:19

Many thanks!
I’ve found this description it very interesting.

Last edited by candyman (2015-10-09 12:16:19)

hcgtv · 2015-10-09 12:57:14

Destry wrote #295519:

The key, in terms of progress, is to argue for the right and sensible things.

Really, cause arguing has never brought anything but the ire of the community.

Destry, I wish this project was the utopia you speak of, but as you point out, it’s a volunteer effort. And there in lies the problem, successful projects at some point decided to treat themselves as a business.

Matt turned WordPress into a business.
Dries positioned Drupal as a business.
The Joomla! community came out the gate as a business.

The day Textpattern is treated as a business, where accountability replaces the “golly gee thanks for taking the time from your busy personal life to pay attention to this here Open Source community project”, is the day the core team will begin their journey down the road to a payday.

Shy of that, we’re just spitting into the wind.

Destry · 2015-10-09 14:26:58

hcgtv wrote #295541:

Really, cause arguing has never brought anything but the ire of the community.

“Argue” in the academic sense of the word, or therapeutic. ;)

And believe me, I know about ire. I get emails loaded with it. I save my two-word argument for that lucky few.

hcgtv · 2015-10-10 07:46:39

Destry wrote #295549:

“Argue” in the academic sense of the word, or therapeutic. ;)

Yes, I love me a good debate. It’s actually where the better ideas come out of the good ones argued for.

But at some point we have to agree on direction, the therapeutic side where you work off all that built up angst.

And believe me, I know about ire. I get emails loaded with it. I save my two-word argument for that lucky few.

I’m creating a template tag just for you, the <••••••••••• name=” “ /> tag.

Edited to turn on password display for worse readability.
– Uli –

Last edited by uli (2015-10-10 13:01:03)

gaekwad · 2015-10-10 10:49:05

hcgtv wrote #295562:

I’m creating a template tag just for you, the <••••••••••• name=” “ /> tag.

Stop being a dick.

Edit gaekwad: Seriously, if Destry annoys you that much, ignore him. Airing dirty laundry in public is petty and just serves to bring things down.

Edit uli: Edited to turn on password display for worse readability.

Last edited by uli (2015-10-10 13:01:25)

hcgtv · 2015-10-10 11:13:58

gaekwad wrote #295565:

Stop being a dick.

Ok, if you say so.

Edit: Seriously, if Destry annoys you that much, ignore him. Airing dirty laundry in public is petty and just serves to bring things down.

I made the tag for Destry’s use, seeing as he uses a two-word argument for the lucky few.

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#85 2015-10-08 19:25:36

Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?

springworks wrote #295467:

#86 2015-10-08 19:37:00

Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?

candyman wrote #295504:

#87 2015-10-08 19:58:43

Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?

#88 2015-10-08 20:35:03

Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?

candyman wrote #295504:

#89 2015-10-09 08:19:15

Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?

kno wrote #285897:

#90 2015-10-09 11:51:13

Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?

candyman wrote #295504:

#91 2015-10-09 12:14:19

Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?

#92 2015-10-09 12:57:14

Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?

Destry wrote #295519:

#93 2015-10-09 14:26:58

Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?

hcgtv wrote #295541:

#94 2015-10-10 07:46:39

Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?

Destry wrote #295549:

#95 2015-10-10 10:49:05

Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?

hcgtv wrote #295562:

#96 2015-10-10 11:13:58

Re: Is the development of Textpattern at the end?

gaekwad wrote #295565:

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