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Re: Is there still a need for a "small content management system"?
Bloke wrote #337591:
Anyone else who can rave about it in under 500 words, please do!
Done. Make that 500 characters!
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Re: Is there still a need for a "small content management system"?
Words. Characters. Meh. Dunno where my brain is it.
Thank you!
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
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Re: Is there still a need for a "small content management system"?
Bloke wrote #337588:
I can’t see any impediment to being added to hosts. If anybody has any info on how this is done or if we’re eligible, then it would certainly be something I’d be interested in considering.
Textpattern has been in the Infomaniak (big Swiss hoster) automatic installer for a few years now : www.infomaniak.com/fr/creer-un-site/cms
edited to format link
Last edited by planeth (2024-08-14 13:14:07)
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Re: Is there still a need for a "small content management system"?
And to add my 2 cents to this discussion, Textpattern is powering the editing & publishing process and the website of our newsletter “La gazette du carbone” (in french) gazetteducarbone.org from The Shifters association. We publish weekly and are past 160 editions.
It took me a Sunday afternoon to setup the core of the system. Thanks to Stefen guidance :)
So yes, there are many needs in all layers of the society for “a small CMS” !
Thanks again for all the good work :)
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Re: Is there still a need for a "small content management system"?
I was told this rather baffling thing about Textpattern after I had recommended it to someone. I have no idea what the worry actulay means:
Textpattern is not an option. Its codebase is too outdated to be deployed on the public internet. It still glues strings together to construct SQL queries instead of more modern and secure approaches like PDO and prepared statements. I like almost everything about Textpattern, but this and similar details is such a red flag.
…. texted postive
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Re: Is there still a need for a "small content management system"?
“PHP Data Objects (PDO) as an abstraction layer used for accessing databases” is so commonly known and used that Wikipedia has no article on it. Security through obscurity?
There is a Wikipedia article for prepared statements, though.
I assume both of these exist to mitigate SQL injection attacks.
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Re: Is there still a need for a "small content management system"?
bici wrote #337616:
Textpattern… still glues strings together to construct SQL queries instead of more modern and secure approaches like PDO and prepared statements.
This is very true. Moving to PDO is on the list but our current method of sanitising all input via doSlash() is secure enough. And it allows us to do things like query variable lists of values (via IN) which is clumsy in PDO and requires a custom code wrapper. We can also use field sorting and a few other handy features that PDO doesn’t support across all drivers.
That’s one of the sticking points actually. It’s not just that we need to create a new DB layer and move queries away from our safe_*() calls and manual query construction.
PDO supports many different DB architectures via drivers, which is great because it would mean Txp admins could also use Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Informix, and so on (depending on which drivers are installed). The downside is that the queries we write have to be compatible with the drivers, and not all databases support some of the features we use. So we’d still probably be limited to MySQL derivatives, which makes PDO an expensive option for little gain compared with migrating to mysqli prepared statements. And plugin authors also need to migrate, and be hamstrung by these limitations unless we can offer some clever workarounds in our library.
Writing our own lightweight library on top of PDO to make it easier and more standardised for us to create queries is hard graft. Do we create a full-blown ORM environment too? Or just make some support methods to help construct queries, like we already have?
There’s an element of Not Invented Here too. Far cleverer people than me have already poured thousands of hours of development effort and brain power into solving this by creating libraries that take the drudgery out of interfacing directly with the monolithic PHP PDO. Some even have built in ORMs.
Wanna know the reason we don’t use any of the main players, or ever intend to unless there’s a radical shift in policy? Because bundling them in Txp would double, triple or quadruple (and more…) its footprint. Seriously. These things are bloated to all hell, offering features we just don’t need, and would likely slow our parser (websites) and back-end user interface.
Doctrine DBAL is probably closest if we don’t use the ORM. That would only weigh in at a couple of MB if we strip out a lot of the gunk we don’t need, but bundling additional drivers bloats it a little further. It also only supports PHP 8.1+ which impacts our minimum supported versions in Txp as a whole and we’d then be bound to Doctrine’s support cycle. Dunno what its performance is like. It’s on my list to investigate.
The above is the same reason I didn’t use an off-the-shelf UI library and built one myself in 4.9.0. It’s not for want of trying, nor lack of available options. It’s that the minimum library I could find was about 4MB after all the dependencies were included. Minimum. Some were considerably larger. That’s almost half Txp’s current uncompressed size! Just to squirt out HTML.
Nothing came remotely close to offering what we needed in a reasonably-sized bundle so I had to bite the bullet and write one. In comparison, our current UI library is less than 120KB. When we phase out the current functions, the impact of that footprint drops slightly. The incessant creep of library-isation and mountains of dependencies via Composer that do more than anyone could ever need, and the assumption that everyone has 5GB of space, infinite bandwidth and the latest versions of everything installed, is rather irritating for small projects that have nimbleness and smallness at their core.
So, yes, this person is correct. We should use PDO. And we will, in some form or another, one day. Pull Requests with sensible, lightweight and rocket-fuelled implementations of PDO are more than welcome!
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
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Re: Is there still a need for a "small content management system"?
In other related news (episode #42):
Stunningly, Automattic’s CEO Matthew Mullenweg threatened that if WP Engine did not agree to pay Automattic – his for-profit entity – a very large sum of money […] he was going to embark on a self-described “scorched earth nuclear approach” toward WP Engine. When his outrageous financial demands were not met, […] Mr. Mullenweg has carried out this wrongful campaign against WP Engine in multiple outlets, including via his keynote address, across several public platforms like X, YouTube, and even on the Wordpress.org site, and through the WordPress Admin panel for all WordPress users
— Source, via Josh Collinsworth.
We live on an island of the blessed methinks.
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Re: Is there still a need for a "small content management system"?
wet wrote #337930:
[…]
As I said earlier – greed is such a wonderful thing!
I was reading the Ars report (arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/automattic-demanded-web-host-pay-32m-annually-for-using-wordpress-trademark/) to that spat, they bury the lead somehow. The comments are the more interesting part.
We live on an island of the blessed methinks.
This. Very much this.
Where is that emoji for a solar powered submarine when you need it ?
Sand space – admin theme for Textpattern
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Re: Is there still a need for a "small content management system"?
Watching the Automattic / WP Engine drama unfold in near-realtime is surreal. I’ve had to move a couple of WP Engine clients away from their services in the last few days, it’s been a tense week. That said, I’ve found some good, well-priced & well-spec’d Wordpress [1] hosts.
1. [ Wordpress is a trademark of the Wordpress Foundation and is used in good faith. ]
Last edited by gaekwad (2024-10-04 09:51:11)
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Re: Is there still a need for a "small content management system"?
gaekwad wrote #337933:
[ “Wordpress is […] Wordpress […]
…which never ceases to remind me1 of the drama surrounding the introduction of capital_P_dangit into the Wordpress core (changeset “props matt”) and the resulting breaking of perfectly working sites for purely cosmetic reasons. </aside>
1 Acquiring beautiful anectodal evidence is a blessing of aging. Sometimes.
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Re: Is there still a need for a "small content management system"?
wet wrote #337934:
[…]
capital_P_dangit[…
I had one job and still got it wrong.
We had one job and still got it wrong.
1 Acquiring beautiful anectodal evidence is a blessing of aging. Sometimes.
Last edited by gaekwad (2024-10-04 11:47:11)
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