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Re: textpattern.com on Hacker news
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:)
Yiannis
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Re: textpattern.com on Hacker news
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)
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Re: textpattern.com on Hacker news
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.
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Re: textpattern.com on Hacker news
[Templates and forms in db] needs a response:)
I weighed in earlier on this. And snuck in a link to the article on the dev/live split.
gaekwad wrote #322833:
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.
+Lots for this.
[Other databases] will be a heap of work to support
If we roll out PDO support, we get a lot of this for free. PHP do the hard work of supporting these databases. Two prominent downsides:
- We lose the ability to order by
FIELD()natively at the database level because that’s a MySQL extension. Hence nice things likename="services, products, contact"need extra post-processing to reorder in code. - We can’t use
IN()because PDO doesn’t natively support parameterized lists as a convenient array – at least didn’t last time I checked the specs; things might have changed in later PHP 7 builds. So we need to add this in at the code level in our PDO layer. We can probably refactor / make more concise versions of our current quote_list/do_list dance to handle this.
Last edited by Bloke (2020-05-03 21:00:20)
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