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Re: Textpattern's face to the public
^^ what Robert says, 100%. The wording and engagement points on the site are critical to advertising “why choose us” over the zillion other options.
If we can fold in the discussion points and wording ideas mentioned above, into whatever design finally pops out, that will be a HUGE help.
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: Textpattern's face to the public
Thanks Robert; great points.
I’ll think of ways of integrating them…
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Re: Textpattern's face to the public
wet wrote #340883:
OTOH, I failed to find Textpatterns entry on this list. Hitting their “(+) Alternative” button there is a marketing challenge that any of us could tackle.
Why Textpattern is not second or third on that list is unfathomable to me .
…. texted postive
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Re: Textpattern's face to the public
Just stumbled across a Facebook ad from a web host that caught my eye. The headline goes:
“Does your capital_P_dangit load like chewing gum? How fast does your capital_P_dangit load?”
Now, let me sit with this for a moment. Performance issues have apparently become so widespread and expected with capital_P_dangit that hosting companies are literally building their marketing strategy around fixing it.
This tells me two things:
- Performance has become a pain point worth advertising against
- We’ve been doing something right all along
Look, I’m not here to throw shade at other platforms. That’s not our style. But I will take a moment to appreciate what we’ve got:
- Fast load times right out of the gate – no plugin juggling, no cache gymnastics, no “premium optimization packages” required
- Lean, mean architecture – That went well ;)
- Happy visitors – who aren’t staring at loading spinners wondering if their browser crashed
It’s kind of wild when you realize that what we consider baseline normal has become a premium upsell feature elsewhere.
Sometimes you need a reminder like this to appreciate what you’ve got. That reminder may make it onto our homepage just as well.
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Re: Textpattern's face to the public
I’ve just had that exact experience migrating a sprawling WordPress ecommerce site to Textpattern. The original site was painful to use. Like, anywhere between 4 and 8 seconds to FCP. Using the backend was like wading through quicksand. I’ve drummed fingertip holes in my desk waiting for it to do anything.
I cloned the HTML and CSS, Txp-ised stuff with a few forms and a single page template, and trimmed some of the 150Kb CSS rules down to 60Kb so it fit in our stylesheet database column.
The HTML is still a bloaty div soup mess that could be optimised, and I could probably cut the CSS down to a fraction of its size, but as a path of least resistance, it works as-is and can be gradually iterated down to a leaner footprint.
The crowning moment when I demoed it came when the client sat down at his computer, logged into the front end site and typed part of a product code into the search box. He hit enter. The article list came back instantly and he sort of blinked, did a double take and said, partly involuntarily, “Jeezus, that’s quick.”
There are currently over 6500 articles in the database.
So, yes, we do take performance for granted here. And we should shout about it.
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: Textpattern's face to the public
Bloke wrote #340903:
So, yes, we do take performance for granted here. And we should shout about it.
Textpattern: A lean CMS with no Performance Anxiety
…. texted postive
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Re: Textpattern's face to the public
We have spent hours to save your seconds.
Maintaining this level of performance will be challenging with distributed cf storage in txp5.
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Re: Textpattern's face to the public
I’m including the demo access page in my homepage design as it is likely to be the first stop for interested visitors.
It’s been a long time since I viewed/used a default install. It hasn’t changed much…
pages/default.txp is long and complex for new users to understand, and could do with some <txp:output_form name="head" /> or <txp::head /> etc. forms to keep it visually manageable. It’s also an opportunity to showcase these critical tags to those starting out.
Similarly the default public site is underwhelming as it is neither a wireframe starting scaffold (too opinionated in its styling), nor a real design. It’s somewhere between the two… The css is not very easy to change (some css variables would go a long way in placing all the critical specifications at the top).
For the demo site we’re missing an opportunity to both show how simple Textpattern can be to use, and a chance to promote all the relevant commentary that has surfaced in this thread in the form of pre-populated content. Multiple sections, articles, in-use custom-fields, and themes to showcase developer staging et al. Images could be svg ‘marketing’ snippets from the homepage etc., or maybe a simple theme eg. yellow flowers so they continue the brand colouring (& ‘dots’ :).
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