Textpattern as a Business - A Brief History

michaelkpate · 2015-10-11 15:35:51

Recently someone made the point that the failure to treat Textpattern as a business has negatively impacted the development of Textpattern. I think it is fair to point out that there have been two previous attempts – neither of which turned out very well.

1) Textdrive

“I have the keys to a shiny new Redhat 9 server, which I want to set up to offer hosting for Textpattern sites (after a year of zero income working on this thing, I need to start figuring out how to make a living from it).” – History of TextDrive

Dean Allen clearly intended Textdrive to fuel Textpattern development. While Textdrive was certainly successful in the form of Joyent:

Mostly, they feel like they’re not being properly appreciated by Joyent, which went on to raise over $100 million in venture capital from more traditional sources. – Why Turning Your Customers Into ‘Mini-VCs’ Isn’t a Great Idea

it seems to have had a negligible effect on Textpattern development.

2) Team Textpattern – the Commercial Version

The team behind Textpattern and Textile are now available for commercial consulting, development and support. – Team Textpattern

Since that didn’t work out either we will never know what Textpattern would look like today.

But personally, I am still glad that the proposed license change never took place.

So while I am not opposed for further attempts, I don’t think we should ignore the past.

colak · 2015-10-11 16:18:36

Hi Michael,

Good yet gloomy read. I edited your first link to the “History of TextDrive” as textile does not seem to like wayback machine links.

In the same tone, you left out the xppattern fork.

hcgtv · 2015-10-11 17:18:35

colak wrote #295601:

In the same tone, you left out the xppattern fork.

xPattern was a fork, not a business. Please remember that xPattern happened because community members wanted to contribute code, and there was no easy mechanism in place other than sending in patches. It would never have happened today, with the code base residing on GitHub.

michaelkpate · 2015-10-11 18:53:04

colak wrote #295601:

Hi Michael,

Good yet gloomy read. I edited your first link to the “History of TextDrive” as textile does not seem to like wayback machine links.

I didn’t intend for it to be gloomy at all. I find it more annoying. :)

In the same tone, you left out the xppattern fork.

I agree with Bert. Xpattern, at least in my opinion, was more like an unsuccessful attempt at a Mambo-Joomla split.

hcgtv · 2015-10-12 01:11:53

michaelkpate wrote #295600:

Recently someone made the point that the failure to treat Textpattern as a business has negatively impacted the development of Textpattern.

Let me expand on the Textpattern as a business mindset.

First off we have to talk about Open Source, where we were 10 years ago, feels like 100. Today if a company doesn’t have an Open Source strategy, their IT Dept. is frowned upon. 10 years ago, you were laughed out of the conference room for suggesting an Open Source software project.

When all these PHP projects began to pop up a decade ago, they were mainly learning exercises that turned into hobbies. Of the 1,000’s of PHP projects that filled up SourceForge, quite a few remain and a select few have flourished.

Those PHP projects that flourished had a Business mindset. There was always someone around to answer the phone or put on a fresh pot of coffee. Those projects where there was nobody home for extended periods of time, have remained hobbies, not taken seriously.

The mindset I talk about can be felt from a visit to a home page, or a support forum. You can sense a vibrant project, and it filters down to their community.

Textpattern treated as a business can flourish, it’s the fastest CMS in the land, serves 5 times more requests per second than WordPress. So why are they heading to WordPress in droves?

Lastly, the mindset I talk about has nothing to do with money at first, because it muddies the waters. Money comes afterwards, once you get the user base into high numbers, then you can contemplate a TXP hosting company, a conversion service, custom plugins, etc.

If you build it, they will come ;)

michaelkpate · 2015-10-12 03:28:20

hcgtv wrote #295616:

Lastly, the mindset I talk about has nothing to do with money at first, because it muddies the waters.
If you build it, they will come ;)

I think it does have to do with money. It would be great if Textpattern had developed a reliable revenue stream the way Wordpress did – although that doesn’t always lead to everyone being happy, either – that could be used to pay the developers to do nothing but develop. That was the point of my examples above.

philwareham · 2015-10-12 06:37:44

Stef, Pete and I discussed the avenues for revenue stream at our meeting on Saturday. All the points above were raised and discussed. The general consensus leans towards what Bert also mentioned, that building a good piece of software that has momentum is the primary focus right now. Any business model can only work when there is a critical mass of users.

Blog/site hosting has been covered extensively by other CMS solutions and would probably not be too beneficial at this stage for us. The amount of admin/support involved outweighs the amount of money that could be made. For example the Ghost blogging platform (that I helped kickstart) had a large amount of publicity and a lot of interested Kickstarter backers – their paid hosting numbers haven’t been stellar. Their publicity mainly came from being a totally new platform that promised a lot (although hasn’t delivered on all those promises just yet IMHO), something we don’t have the luxury of.

A small revenue stream can come from advertising on the brand sites and from consultancy work, that is the releastic short-term plan until we have a couple of new releases out the door. Then we can revisit this topic I think.

hcgtv · 2015-10-12 13:00:08

michaelkpate wrote #295619:

I think it does have to do with money. It would be great if Textpattern had developed a reliable revenue stream the way Wordpress did – although that doesn’t always lead to everyone being happy, either – that could be used to pay the developers to do nothing but develop. That was the point of my examples above.

Money talk at the beginning tends to kill the momentum. There’s been many discussions on this forum in the past that have led nowhere because the revenue stream wasn’t attractive enough.

From the article on Thesis: “The commercial theme movement started in 2007 and took off in 2008.”

That’s the revenue stream we missed out on because we don’t do one-click-themes, that’s not in Textpattern’s philosophy or something along those lines.

philwareham wrote #295624:

The general consensus leans towards what Bert also mentioned, that building a good piece of software that has momentum is the primary focus right now. Any business model can only work when there is a critical mass of users.

Glad to see that building good software and attracting more users is in the plans.

Can’t wait to see the roadmap.

michaelkpate · 2015-10-12 14:52:38

hcgtv wrote #295632:

That’s the revenue stream we missed out on because we don’t do one-click-themes, that’s not in Textpattern’s philosophy or something along those lines.

It wasn’t a philosophy problem.

One thing I was hoping to get in for this release, but it’s not quite there yet, is a themes engine I’ve been working on: this allows simultaneous installation of pages, stylesheets and forms through a simple installer much like the one used for plugins. Look for it in an RC or two. – 1.0rc1 Released

It just never happened.

It’ll be ready when someone writes it. Simple as that. – Template Manager

The ironic thing, of course, is that originally originally Wordpress theming was done in a single file. Which got overwritten when doing an upgrade if you weren’t careful.

That is why I am still super-enthusiastic about what Stef has been doing lately.

hcgtv · 2015-10-12 16:27:39

michaelkpate wrote #295637:

It’ll be ready when someone writes it. Simple as that. – Template Manager

The real irony is that Zem wrote, but never released Zem Themes.

NicolasGraph · 2015-10-13 07:34:50

Just a thought about publicity; couldn’t we use something like “pay with a tweet” for any Textpattern or plugin download? It would be just a little part of the publicity solution but it’s maybe not too hard to do for a beginning…

colak · 2015-10-13 09:50:07

that would be fine but what happens if someone does not have a twitter account?

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