textpattern.com on Hacker news

gaekwad · 2020-05-03 11:36:26

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23050113

Our server is doing some brisk business today, thanks to an increased amount of traffic from a Hacker News post about Textpattern 4.8.0.

Hits and traffic are up considerably on a typical day, I don’t have accurate figures to hand right now but we’re running at ~8-10x usual traffic.

All is running smoothly. I’ll update this post should that situation change.

Thank you.

etc · 2020-05-03 13:57:54

And we have reached 500 stars!

gaekwad · 2020-05-03 14:06:21

etc wrote #322807:

And we have reached 500 stars!

Hooray! I made sure Twitter heard the good news: twitter.com/textpattern/status/1256920181709963265

colak · 2020-05-03 14:08:34

That’s excellent news. It would be great to know if we had any new downloads.

Bloke · 2020-05-03 14:45:05

Indeed. Awesome stuff, thanks for jumping in and answering queries. I’ve added to the discussion re: custom fields.

If we’re getting traction there, might it be nice to polish up and publish that draft article about the dev/live workflow split, and drop it into the conversation? Or is that not the right audience?

gaekwad · 2020-05-03 14:46:46

Bloke wrote #322814:

If we’re getting traction there, might it be nice to polish up and publish that draft article about the dev/live workflow split, and drop it into the conversation? Or is that not the right audience?

Better to ask for forgiveness than permission, at least in this instance. You have fresh enough eyes to do it?

gaekwad · 2020-05-03 14:47:58

Aside: traffic now tending toward more normal levels, we’re off the Hacker News front page. There will likely be a long-tail effect for the coming days, but I’m not expecting a further spike.

Bloke · 2020-05-03 15:25:48

Ah, let’s do it here. We can always create a second article more tailored for people unfamiliar with the CMS for publication elsewhere at a later date.

The end of the web development staging server.

Fee free to distribute or drop this into conversation at any suitable juncture.

EDIT: Incidentally, there are a few tiny weeny annoyances with the way this feature works in 4.8.0. Both fixed in 4.8.1, which we should push out as soon as we possibly can, imo.

Last edited by Bloke (2020-05-03 15:27:15)

gaekwad · 2020-05-03 16:14:21

Bloke wrote #322824:

Incidentally, there are a few tiny weeny annoyances with the way this feature works in 4.8.0. Both fixed in 4.8.1, which we should push out as soon as we possibly can, imo.

Anything new that needs testing, ~~or shall we shoot for a weekend release~~?

Edit: hasty strikethrough.

Last edited by gaekwad (2020-05-03 16:18:03)

gaekwad · 2020-05-03 16:24:56

Bloke wrote #322824:

Both fixed in 4.8.1, which we should push out as soon as we possibly can, imo.

Opened 1485 to track things.

colak · 2020-05-03 17:03:48

Bloke wrote #322824:

Ah, let’s do it here. We can always create a second article more tailored for people unfamiliar with the CMS for publication elsewhere at a later date.

The end of the web development staging server.

Fee free to distribute or drop this into conversation at any suitable juncture.

EDIT: Incidentally, there are a few tiny weeny annoyances with the way this feature works in 4.8.0. Both fixed in 4.8.1, which we should push out as soon as we possibly can, imo.

I’m reading your text where you have in relative safety, is that needed? I believe that in safety would be enough. In any case whatever we do on the net is unsafe in one way or another.

Bloke · 2020-05-03 17:20:27

colak wrote #322828:

I’m reading your text where you have in relative safety, is that needed? … In any case whatever we do on the net is unsafe in one way or another.

Perhaps it lost something in translation. I can remove that. I meant that you still have to be careful – see the caveats at the end – regarding changing plugins and stuff. So it’s not complete safety insofar as you can still knacker it up if you’re not careful.

EDIT: Fixed the sentence to be clearer: “But what if there was a way to safely work on a live site?” Thanks for the feedback.

Last edited by Bloke (2020-05-03 17:23:37)

colak · 2020-05-03 17:40:50

I think that we should also learn from the comments in that thread and also respond to them. I have no account so…

I don’t know anything about Textpattern but I love that the homepage of the project has a picture of a Commodore PET on it. That’s going back a long ways.

should we change that?

Textpattern is a bit like “everything that’s modern and hip right now, like SSG, let’s do the opposite”.

I guess with SSG he means Static Site Generator. I’m not sure that this is hip now but, it is indeed one of our issues, as txp offers no automatic way to make the site static. Although this is not txp’s aim anyway, I can think of a number of sites which they were made for particular reasons and had from/to dates. Having a plugin for those would actually return fewer errors on the web especially when servers upgrade their specs.

(It would be great if SQLite was officially supported, or anything but MySQL)

It is… isn’t it?

All templates, forms etc in the database also means you don’t have a file lying around. Which means you cannot point your favorite text editor you it. You either use the builtin “editor” (just a form field) or copy and paste it into your editor and back, if you need syntax highlighting, validation or whatever.

This needs a response:)

gaekwad · 2020-05-03 18:47:21

colak wrote #322830:

should we change [the old computer]?

In my opinion, no. It’s endearing. Anything that takes focus away from web server racks is a good thing, brings in a different crown. The monster/sunflower/cityscape/alien ship has nothing to do with Textpattern, but it’s fun.

I guess with SSG he means Static Site Generator. I’m not sure that this is hip now but, it is indeed one of our issues, as txp offers no automatic way to make the site static.

Hacker News is something of a cliché in some circles, lots of emerging technologies, in-depth discussions about sometimes very inane stuff, so personally I wouldn’t worry about it. There’s space for static site generators, and they can live alongside content management systems, but I would be -1 for adding a static site generator into Textpattern. Far better to make the glue available for a battle-tested SSG to be able to ingest all the pages in a Textpattern and spit out the relevant files for a static site.

[SQLite] is… isn’t it?

As I understand it, SQLite understands a subset of SQL commands, though I haven’t used it for a very long time, and I have no idea if Textpattern will install on SQLite. The same could be same about PostgreSQL or MongoDB – some syntax works in a similar way, though I’m sure there will be a heap of work to support it, and I don’t get the feeling there’s an audience for it. Adding more database vendors also significantly increases the work involved with maintenance and development, and considering the size of the development team at present, I’d be inclined to steer clear.

[Templates and forms in db] needs a response:)

Agreed.

Last edited by gaekwad (2020-05-03 18:47:44)

jakob · 2020-05-03 19:54:42

colak wrote #322830:

I guess with SSG he means Static Site Generator. I’m not sure that this is hip now but, it is indeed one of our issues, as txp offers no automatic way to make the site static. Although this is not txp’s aim anyway, I can think of a number of sites which they were made for particular reasons and had from/to dates. Having a plugin for those would actually return fewer errors on the web especially when servers upgrade their specs.

SSGs are certainly very popular at the moment but they’re not for every situation. Same with “everything must be reactive” even if a simple site.

You can get some of the speed benefit of a static site using caching – e.g. etc_cache to cache page blocks or entire pages – without relinquishing the search capability and advantages of a database-driven cms. Often, other aspects are more crucial in improving page loading speeds than DB speed.

EDIT: There’s also yab_api_cache which will cache entire pages.

If your site is no longer being updated, or a one-off, you can also scrape it to a self-contained set of HTML pages using a web dumper app like sitesucker, webarch or similar (I’m sure there are plenty more apps, also for Windows).

EDIT: Just read on that thread the same idea with wget.

And if you want to do that on a constant basis, there’s services like Sitesauce. Of course, that’s not quite the same as an SSG. There’s probably self-build ways to do that too.

Textpattern CMS support forum

#1 2020-05-03 11:36:26