The evolution of Textpattern

hcgtv · 2016-09-08 12:56:30

Destry wrote #301227:

Textpattern is great for a lot of projects and content types; especially where content has a clear division of labor.

That’s what Textpattern’s documentation workflow has been over the years, 2 or 3 volunteers who took it upon themselves to write and maintain the docs. There was a division of labor, collaboration by the many never quite materialized.

You talk about Doctor CMS, which brought me to the Minio docs.

Would you like to see the Textpattern docs looking just like Minio’s by the end of next week?

Installation
Quickstart
User Guide
- Content
  - Textile
- Presentation
  - Tags
  - Themes
- Admin
  - Plugins
About

I can guarantee, without a shadow of a doubt, that Textpattern 4.6 will render a doc page before Doctor CMS even has a chance to start it’s progress wheel.

philwareham · 2016-09-08 13:00:58

I’d rather you help work on the project and platform I have chosen (and I’ve already explained why I’ve chosen) – that being here

Destry · 2016-09-08 13:01:02

I might as well add… aside from the functional features I outlined above, a flat-file approach to documentation on GitHub also allows contributors to use the editor they want to use, rather than constrain them to a single one.

Sure, Phil has made the admin-side pretty. But I don’t want to carry a tool belt when all I need is a pencil. I work with words more than anything else most of the day, and there’s nothing I’ve found yet that beats iA Writer as a copy editing application, and I’ve tried and paid for many editors. (I also like Scrivner, but that’s a different world.)

I like Writer because it’s designed for writers, not developers. It’s designed around the writing process, and the features that writers are sensitive to; editing comfort, mainly. The only way it could be better is if it supported Textile too, and in that respect I hear Ulysses is pretty good (supports both). I also love that it’s a native OS application, and I can manage files in a regular file manager, both locally and in the ether. No web server or database overhead to worry about. That works quite nice with GitHub repos, and when I’m offline.

But, this isn’t a pitch to sell you on iA Writer. You likely have your editor preference too, and that’s the whole point — be able to use what you like! It just happens to be another good reason for flat-file collaboration.

If Txp articles could be flat-files, and I could push from Writer to Txp, that’s how I would work whenever I didn’t need to fiddle with custom fields, output configurations, metadata, time stamps, or whatever. Headless, baby, headless.

hcgtv · 2016-09-08 13:09:23

philwareham wrote #301229:

I’d rather you help work on the project and platform I have chosen (and I’ve already explained why I’ve chosen) – that being here

Sorry, I don’t do Markdown.

Destry wrote #301230:

Headless, baby, headless.

We’re getting there, give me time.

sacripant · 2016-09-08 13:30:45

Again, I think I misspelled my thoughts.

I understand why you have chosen to github + Jekyll: Github for the benefits just described by Destry and Jekyll because he is integrated with Github : automatic compilation for each commit in maser branch.
Cool, perfect, it corresponds to your need and it’s efficient.

Truly, I would have been really happy if Textpattern proposed an articles import system since flat files (it’s already exist for pages / forms / css, why not for articles ? ).
And needs of a new documentation site could have been a good pretext and challenge to develop it.

michaelkpate · 2016-09-08 14:34:12

I always like to be the one to bring some context to these discussions.

From 2004

Alright. I did some poking around, and honestly MediaWiki does seem to be the best setup for this sort of thing. I rather like all the sub-page discussion so that regions can be discussed. – Remillard

From 2006:

Why was MediaWiki picked for Textbook? – hcgtv

At the time it happened I think because it was the product with the best multi-language support. – hakjoon

From 2008:

TextBook should use Textpattern! I’m serious, MediaWiki is a pain to use, especially when you’re used to Textile. I hate that there’s no obvious hierarchy and that pages get lost in the wiki. Given wiki accounts are manually created, I don’t see any problem with using TXP authors or copy editors. – jm

The downside to using Txp is: defacement and mistakes – a wiki keeps a history you can one-click revert back to when that happens and whom changed what and when? – a wiki usually allows you to track that with feeds. I would recommend DokuWiki, if you want to switch to something else. – Mary

Alright this last bit of nonsense with Textbook has me really wanting to pull the plug on MediaWiki. At this point I am really leaning towards DokuWiki. I don’t think we lose any features in comparison with MediaWiki and it can do Textile with a plugin. It also has an auth interface so maybe we can eventually make wiki login and forum login the same. Also since DokuWiki is file based I think I could probably create a transformer to convert scrapped textbook pages into DokuWiki pages. That to me seems way more attractive then copying and pasting a ton of files. I think this would mostly be useful for the tag list. – hakjoon

zero, most of this will be fixed in the transition to doku wiki. – jm

From 2009:

The concept of using a wiki at all for user-generated docs was still new for a lot of people and they just didn’t — or didn’t want — to get it. You’d often hear, “It’s about Txp so it should be created using Txp” or similar crap reasoning. People were — and often still are — locked in the blog mentality. – Destry

Last edited by michaelkpate (2016-09-08 17:03:31)

hcgtv · 2016-09-08 15:04:33

Michael,

During the xPattern era, I started converting the docs to DokuWiki. I started with the tags, never got around to the rest. The flat files in DokuWiki were the basis for TXP Tags.

Got a question, how do you search the forum?

michaelkpate · 2016-09-08 16:58:12

hcgtv wrote #301234:

Got a question, how do you search the forum?

It isn’t particularly easy to find things if you can’t think of the right keyword to search for. I started out trying to find the earliest occurrence of “mediawiki” and kind of went from there with combos like “mediawiki dokuwiki” and “mediawiki textbook” and so forth.

Bert is doing a pretty quick job with the Tag pages so the way I see it we can make Doku the official and interwiki link to textbook until stuff is migrated over. – hakjoon

I seem to remember there was some sort of purge of posts that were deemed no longer relevant but I am not really sure.

Oh, and I found another post to add to the timeline above.

mrdale · 2016-09-08 18:19:48

meh… I think this discussion is pretty moot. We should use any tools available to make developing TXP easier and better.

After resisting for a good while, I now use tools that can save me a significant amount of time. I was, however, dragged kicking and screaming into using them on a daily basis by those younger and less set in their ways than me.

Thanks Steelie, and even my great (sprite-map using, and “with-selected” must be placed somewhere beyond the viewport) adversary Phil ;)

Task runners like gulp and grunt are really no brainers, they just queue up tasks that you’d be doing anyway and execute them flawlessly. I personally love gulp
Sass or Less is actually what CSS should have been all along. Learning them provides an immediate and dramatic payoff in flexibility, versatility and saved time.
I Could care less about composer, but I suppose someone will drag me kicking and screaming into utilyzing that as well at some point.

Interestingly enough, I was talking to a Microsoft developer this weekend, talking about how great all these new (and free) tools are and he lamented the fact that tey are not permitted to use any of them because of NIH. Glad we don’t have that problem.

I

hcgtv · 2016-09-08 19:02:05

michaelkpate wrote #301236:

I seem to remember there was some sort of purge of posts that were deemed no longer relevant but I am not really sure.

Yeah, there was a movement of posts to an archive category. Were they later purged, were they moved to a hidden location, I don’t know.

mrdale wrote #301237:

We should use any tools available to make developing TXP easier and better.

There are two ways to answer that, because there are two audiences.

As a web developer, you like the speed of Textpattern, the tags, the ease of pages and forms, plugins, etc.

As an end user, you work in the admin, writing your content and editing your site.

So for a web developer, Textpattern is this site rendering machine. You feed it your layout, configure some settings, save the code, backup the database, deliver your product.

I’m an end user, but also the client.

Sell me on Textpattern beyond the benefits you as a web developer enjoy.

michaelkpate · 2016-09-08 20:10:12

mrdale wrote #301237:

Interestingly enough, I was talking to a Microsoft developer this weekend, talking about how great all these new (and free) tools are and he lamented the fact that tey are not permitted to use any of them because of NIH. Glad we don’t have that problem.

I was momentarily confused why the National Institutes of Health would prevent Microsoft developers from using open-source development tools.

mrdale · 2016-09-08 21:00:39

hcgtv wrote #301238:

Sell me on Textpattern beyond the benefits you as a web developer enjoy.

From a front-side site user or back-side site editor’s perspective, the benefits of using these tools would be abstracted one level.

SASS/Grunt just makes a project easier to manage and should result in tighter more consistent css. That is a secondary benefit to the above group. Because everything is in formulas and variables it actually should make variations on the stock admin theme WAY easier to customize.

I guess I have to ask, why do you care if someone uses SASS or not?

hcgtv · 2016-09-08 21:23:42

mrdale wrote #301241:

I guess I have to ask, why do you care if someone uses SASS or not?

I don’t mind at all, SASS is CSS on steroids, I’m still wrapping my head around CSS.

It’s not about what you use, or I use, it’s about what an end user can or would do with a zipped up Textpattern. It’s about improving that experience, because we all know that Textpattern rocks.

The core renders pages on my mobile of the TXP Tags site instantaneously.

It really is a hidden gem of a CMS.

etc · 2016-09-09 08:29:08

hcgtv wrote #301242:

The core renders pages on my mobile of the TXP Tags site instantaneously.

That’s nice to hear, and 4.6 is ~50% faster than 4.5 on pages with many tags, especially if your db server caches queries. On TXP Tags you can gain another 30% if you make 4-col-portfolio stylesheet cacheable (rvm_css plugin?).

Last edited by etc (2016-09-09 08:29:44)

hcgtv · 2016-09-09 13:46:25

etc wrote #301245:

That’s nice to hear, and 4.6 is ~50% faster than 4.5 on pages with many tags, especially if your db server caches queries. On TXP Tags you can gain another 30% if you make 4-col-portfolio stylesheet cacheable (rvm_css plugin?).

TXP Tags is running Bootstrap, so the CSS in the Textpattern database is very small, 27 lines.

I’m waiting on TXP 4.6, already got all my other web based software updated to their latest versions.

Textpattern CMS support forum

#16 2016-09-08 12:56:30

Re: The evolution of Textpattern

Destry wrote #301227:

#17 2016-09-08 13:00:58

Re: The evolution of Textpattern

#18 2016-09-08 13:01:02

Re: The evolution of Textpattern

#19 2016-09-08 13:09:23

Re: The evolution of Textpattern

philwareham wrote #301229:

Destry wrote #301230:

#20 2016-09-08 13:30:45

Re: The evolution of Textpattern

#21 2016-09-08 14:34:12

Re: The evolution of Textpattern

#22 2016-09-08 15:04:33

Re: The evolution of Textpattern

#23 2016-09-08 16:58:12

Re: The evolution of Textpattern

hcgtv wrote #301234:

#24 2016-09-08 18:19:48

Re: The evolution of Textpattern

#25 2016-09-08 19:02:05

Re: The evolution of Textpattern

michaelkpate wrote #301236:

mrdale wrote #301237:

#26 2016-09-08 20:10:12

Re: The evolution of Textpattern

mrdale wrote #301237:

#27 2016-09-08 21:00:39

Re: The evolution of Textpattern

hcgtv wrote #301238:

#28 2016-09-08 21:23:42

Re: The evolution of Textpattern

mrdale wrote #301241:

#29 2016-09-09 08:29:08

Re: The evolution of Textpattern

hcgtv wrote #301242:

#30 2016-09-09 13:46:25

Re: The evolution of Textpattern

etc wrote #301245:

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