TXP5 or Textpattern 5?

giz · 2024-11-20 23:10:09

On the subject of the branding Textpattern, I had an idea about our public facing demo site.

Instead of a default install, its full of content as its the backend for https://textpattern.com/.

So, initially https://textpattern.com/ presents however we like, but includes subtle/but-not-to-subtle links to the relevant tab in Textpattern. Visitors get a thrill thinking they’re changing the content, whereas they are actually changing regularly flushed / reset database tables. They see how Textpattern works at the same time, complete with shortcodes, themes, etc.

Textpattern is its own advert :)

Last edited by giz (2024-11-20 23:10:54)

Bloke · Yesterday 07:24:01

Interesting idea. If we can get over the user-need-to-login hump, that’s novel.

Technically we’d need to repave like we do now from a recently cloned git repo, and also change links etc in Prefs and internal articles. Plus the usual dance with images/files since Txp still doesn’t have the import ability for those (yet…).

One potential sticking point is what will site spiders think to having duplicate content out there? Essentially a clone of textpattern.com. Unless you mean allow people to change the live site, which I’m not comfy with given it links to the official download files and could be interfered with, regardless of how short that time window is.

gaekwad · Yesterday 14:08:36

I’ve got plans to add a heap of content (images, files, articles, themes etc) to the demo sites, which is air gapped from .com – that would do largely the same thing.

giz · Yesterday 17:11:05

Bloke wrote #338307:

One potential sticking point is what will site spiders think to having duplicate content out there? Essentially a clone of textpattern.com. Unless you mean allow people to change the live site, which I’m not comfy with given it links to the official download files and could be interfered with, regardless of how short that time window is.

Judicious use of canonical tags should keep spiders happy.

Thinking out loud here; a multi-site installation:

Public site, admin access only
- Acts as the source for repaving the other sites
- Includes ‘edit’ links which point to a demo site
Demo1, Demo2, Demo3 sites
- Cloned from the public site, apart from login details which automagically aren’t needed
- Vistors can make their own mess, and preview it too.
- After a limited time, you’re sent back to the public site and your login recycled.

Alternatively we could html-demo it.

Pete: populating the demo sites with content is a great start, and needed anyway.

.

I’ve had a few ex-WordPress clients who are blown away by how simple it is to make changes to their Textpattern site when I screen-share during a meeting.

You mean I just have to click on the icon next to the title to edit, and I don’t have to first look for it in the CMS?

Bloke · Yesterday 18:33:15

giz wrote #338311:

You mean I just have to click on the icon next to the title to edit, and I don’t have to first look for it in the CMS?

Hah, yeah. We do take such simplicity for granted. I found this out (in reverse) when I got drafted in to update someone’s WordPress site and I must have spent the first 25 minutes trying to find the content. Then when I did make the change (Save… publish… are you sure?) I couldn’t fathom why it didn’t alter it on the site, only to (eventually) find that I had to change it three times: once for desktop, tablet and mobile views hidden behind tiny icons on a subpanel. Wtf?!

Then they asked for a text colour change across the site. I found the relevant template. Made a change to the colour (three times), saved, published yahde yahde… and it only affected a handful of pages because the rest had been tinkered with at the article level, meaning I’d need to hunt down every instance to make the requested change.

Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Remind me again why WordPress is inexplicably the number one content management system on the planet? Cos I sure as hell can’t find a reason.

gaekwad · Yesterday 22:39:47

Bloke wrote #338312:

Remind me again why WordPress is inexplicably the number one content management system on the planet?

Just be thankful it’s not fscking Drupal, mate.

giz · Yesterday 22:42:53

It’s ‘good enough’, apparently. Like so much consumer crud, where marketing hogs any available creativity.

gaekwad · Yesterday 23:00:28

giz wrote #338305:

Instead of a default install, its full of content as its the backend for https://textpattern.com/.

So, initially https://textpattern.com/ presents however we like, but includes subtle/but-not-to-subtle links to the relevant tab in Textpattern. Visitors get a thrill thinking they’re changing the content, whereas they are actually changing regularly flushed / reset database tables.

Just so my cards are on the table, this absolutely terrifies me and it’s a hard no.

There are lots of drive-by attack attempts on our web properties, and the frequency / complexity is growing.

Looking at the logs for the demo sites, there are hundreds of attempts each day to screw around with the sites over and above the ‘allowed’ changes. I did an experiment some years ago of saving the names of the files / images that people attempted to upload, and that alone worried me enough to really lock it down.

I made a conscious decision to have a completely unconnected domain name on an air gapped server in another country to our project sites. To my knowledge, there is no ‘glue’ connecting the demo sites to anything we run as part of the project portfolio. This helps me sleep at night, with limited success.

I am building the next version of our sites and demo server framework over the winter (northern hemisphere), which will have a wider array of PHP & MySQL versions, bulletproof PHP integration with the web server (there are some issues at present, I’ll talk more about this when it’s fixed), and lots more content. It’s long overdue, I admit – especially the content side of things.

Modularising content import at install time would be tremendous. Images, files, articles, themes – the whole thing – that would be a utilitarian way to essentially package up a site in a way that Textpattern can set up on installation.

Commercial WordPress themes often come like this, and it’s really handy for newbies to get a handle on how the nuts & bolts work. This route I really like. Here’s a 200MB .zip for ALL THE THINGS© for your new website, just chuck it in and BLAM, it works. Now you go ahead and tool around with things, if you break it you just hit reset and chuck the .zip back in again. Ta-da!

We should do this, and the schema can be called…‘Textplethora’.

gaekwad · Yesterday 23:03:32

giz wrote #338315:

It’s ‘good enough’, apparently.

At the present time, there are ~300K active installations for a post duplicating plugin: wordpress.com/plugins/copy-delete-posts

What a time to be alive, eh?

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