News from a neighbouring galaxy

jakob · 2018-10-26 13:46:33

Possibly of interest to those who occasionally look beyond our galaxy: Expression Engine goes free.

Bloke · 2018-10-26 22:35:09

Intriguing. I’ve never used it – cf. not being free until now – but from what I recall, it was the closest relative of Txp due to its tagish nature (I may be wrong here). It’ll be interesting to see how this affects us.

colak · 2018-10-27 05:49:32

I remember it when it came out. It was open source initially but moved on to close it soon after. The templating language is very similar to txp but–in my view–not as consistent which is the reason I never used it. When they first started, I seem to recall that textile was one of the languages supported but I can not see it there any more.

What I find attractive is the per article idea which is what txp has as well, but it also controls the cfs visible in the admin area. Their implementation of unlimited cfs is also great.

I hope that we can learn on how they implemented some of their cool features now that its source will be available.

phiw13 · 2018-10-27 07:21:58

That is interesting. A long long time ago I downloaded it and had a brief play with it. TXP was more to my liking, though. I’ll have a renewed look at it, as Colak notes, they have an interesting implementation of custom fields.

Perhaps there a more things we can learn / discover and eventually adopt.

etc · 2018-10-27 21:24:31

It’s still “register with us, show our logo, not commercial only, pay for extensions” and other boring restrictions.

bici · 2018-10-28 01:00:00

I’ll pipe in and toot their horn: pMachine/ExpressionEngine
I first used pMachine while awaiting Dean’s long road to release of Textpattern.
Then i used EE for a variety of sites. I had ten on the go at one time. I am now down to one. Because I was nenevr able to even contemplate re-doing the one site in TxP.

Yes both have Templating languages that are somewhat similar.

Now i like both, and i have to say that i still don’t grok all the tags that is TxP. To me EE is much easier to intuitive. But that is just me.
Also it is a pleasure to work with using the hellomountee add on.

I think that there is much to learn by taking EE for a test drive.

Did i mention multiple field names and highly customizable … and multiple categories?

Note; i bet all the add-on developers will not adopt open source for their products.

jakob · 2018-10-28 10:48:36

etc wrote #314782:

It’s still “register with us, show our logo, not commercial only, pay for extensions” and other boring restrictions.

Good point, I hadn’t seen that.

colak wrote #314761:

What I find attractive is the per article idea which is what txp has as well, but it also controls the cfs visible in the admin area. Their implementation of unlimited cfs is also great.

Forgive me, as I’m not very familiar with EE for the same reasons as Stef said. You say “per article” – if you mean an article as a “content entity”, then I agree with you. If you meant an article as a “page URL”, then from reading their site, I understood the opposite: that EE does not specifically tie a content type to a page.
I regularly (ab)use txp articles to make content blocks that don’t correspond exactly to a page, but then have to make sure my site navigation, feed, etc. don’t make it possible to call up that item independently (in extreme cases adding a redirect to prevent that).

That said, I do like their concept of channels as a way of defining a content type and defining the (custom-)fields that show for each content type in the editor, then using a channel tag in the templates to set the context for the other tags. I saw something similar in the support docs for Contentful.

I hope that we can learn on how they implemented some of their cool features now that its source will be available.

We have a roadmap, but it’s always interesting to compare implementations even if only to see more clearly what fits and what doesn’t.

colak · 2018-10-28 15:19:00

jakob wrote #314789:

Forgive me, as I’m not very familiar with EE for the same reasons as Stef said. You say “per article” – if you mean an article as a “content entity”, then I agree with you. If you meant an article as a “page URL”, then from reading their site, I understood the opposite: that EE does not specifically tie a content type to a page.
I regularly (ab)use txp articles to make content blocks that don’t correspond exactly to a page, but then have to make sure my site navigation, feed, etc. don’t make it possible to call up that item independently (in extreme cases adding a redirect to prevent that).

I guess that what I meant to say there is their use of channels. Apologies for the confusion.

etc · 2018-10-28 16:49:51

jakob wrote #314789:

I regularly (ab)use txp articles to make content blocks that don’t correspond exactly to a page, but then have to make sure my site navigation, feed, etc. don’t make it possible to call up that item independently (in extreme cases adding a redirect to prevent that).

Is no good, articles are intended to be published. Yes, txp lacks this general-purpose “content block” entity, but hey, it was initially developed for blogging. Things are moving, 4.8 should be more flexible in this regard.

JimJoe · 2018-10-29 15:01:38

I looked at it, and the restrictions, doesn’t work for me in the way I would want to use it.

Algaris · 2018-10-30 08:40:08

etc wrote #314782:

It’s still “register with us, show our logo, not commercial only, pay for extensions” and other boring restrictions.

I did notice that the ExpressionEngine License Agreement was lasted Revised on 29 September, 2015.

I also found the following post on their forums

Rick Ellis wrote:

License will be updated November 1 along with a product version number change, so there is a clean start rather than switching licenses mid stream. The core product requires a number of changes as well (for example, license number verification is no longer needed), which will be in place when the new license goes into effect.

Maybe they might remove the restrictions then if they are going truly open source?

Last edited by Algaris (2018-10-30 08:41:00)

etc · 2018-10-30 15:18:03

Nice to know, we will see then. No doubt, EE is a great CMS, just a bit too commercial (atm) to my taste.

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#1 2018-10-26 13:46:33