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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.
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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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Re: Textpattern's face to the public
Bump my previous post⇡
.
I’ve taken the design prototype as far as I dare using plain html. There is still refinement to do, but that comes later…
Dark Mode is in (I’m still playing with the definition of a ‘dark yellow’), and :focus, :focus-within aren’t finalised (I’m struggling with getting some kind of consistency between Safari & Chrome treatment of the <details> tag). This level of detail is better handled when I refactor the css for production.
@Pete: I hope you don’t mind my taking on your demo login page; I’ve made it part of the main site with the same banner and footer…
On the subject of the banner & footer used throughout the site, does textpattern.com serve these same forms to docs.textpattern.com, plugins.textpattern.com and forum.textpattern.com via curl etc.?
My next step is to use real content and existing structures i.e. a clone of the textpattern.com database. Whilst I could work on a dev template on the live database, it’d be better to keep it separate so the forum can continue with commentary.
In time I’ll publish my fork to GitHub for public perusal, and will flesh-out my cloned database content as far as possible…
Can someone send me a copy of the database?
.
I need advice on how to use the file structure of the main repository textpattern-com-website.
- I’ve forked a branch, placed it on my Mac:
~/Sites/local.txpcom/textpattern-com-website - I’ve set up a vanilla install of Textpattern on txpcom.all-sorts.biz, and added a theme named
txpcom, exported it to the file system. - Nova is configured so that its local path is
textpattern-com-website/src/templates, remote path is/blah/txpcom.all-sorts.biz/themes/txpcom
All good for the txp templates, but now ~/Sites/local.txpcom/textpattern-com-website/src/assets is omitted on the live server. Phil uses Grunt to populate assets and themes etc. into their respective production directories, and Grunt is more than I can chew.
I can restructure the repository so it can live in /themes/txpcom without the need for Grunt, but I suspect this will ruffle many feathers!
How should I proceed?
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Re: Textpattern's face to the public
giz wrote #341223:
Can someone send me a copy of the database?
I have no db access anyway, but sharing txp db looks potentially leaky, whatever degree of trust we had. It contains some sensitive data, like pwd hashes and cookie nonces, so few tables need to be purged first.
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Re: Textpattern's face to the public
etc wrote #341240:
…so few tables need to be purged first.
Thanks. The primary content tables are all I need. textpattern, categories, sections and maybe images.
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Re: Textpattern's face to the public
giz wrote #341223:
@Pete: I hope you don’t mind my taking on your demo login page; I’ve made it part of the main site with the same banner and footer…
The demo site is deliberately on another domain / host so there’s a level of separation for security (along with other considerations). It’s part of my own Textpattern Consulting biz thing, which has been in the skunkworks for some time officially and will launch properly when it makes it up the priority queue far enough. There are other ‘big’ things above it at the moment, but they’re due to launch in spring next year, so fingers crossed after that. Maybe. Ish.
On the subject of the banner & footer used throughout the site, does textpattern.com serve these same forms to docs.textpattern.com, plugins.textpattern.com and forum.textpattern.com via curl etc.?
Each of the sites above is independent of the others, but there are multiple links behind the scenes for sharing of assets, security, optimisations etc.
I appreciate there’s a bunch of work that’s gone into this so far, but this redesign just turns me off and feels like a step back. We’ve got a coherent-ish brand established already, thanks to Phil’s work over the years, and I’m a bit baffled why this is being considered for retirement.
If anything, what we’re lacking is content. Tutorials. Docs. Examples. Themes. Comparitively, a website redesign with bouncing balls is a real head scratcher for me, and churning out some code generated by an LLM seems counter-intuitive to our project ethos of thoughtful, considered code that’s lean, fast, and efficient.
This isn’t gatekeeping, so please don’t take it that way. Perhaps it’s just me that feels this way, but there are plenty of tasks that can be dug into that will take us forward as we go into the Textpattern 4.9 chapter.
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