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Twenty years ago today...
… I registered for a forum account here and became a Textpattern convert. The path to that junction is well documented in my 10,000 reasons to use Textpattern post, five years ago today. And the sentiments still stand.
Every time I reflect on my choice to pour twenty years of my life into something – even as a hobbyist – I’m reminded of how much of a good fit Textpattern is to fulfil the notion that:
A website is never “finished”.
This constant state of digital flux means, while the site content is naturally evolving, the layout of that content is also evolving, separately, with a different rhythm.
At the time, there was nothing that came even close. Every tool I found and tried, and subsequently uninstalled, had this irritating amalgam of Presentation and Content in the noble spirit of trying to make everything point, click and foolproof for people who don’t know the difference between a <div> and a <span>. And that presents unnecessary maintenance work every time I decide to make a change.
Like many people with a coding mindset, I dislike repeating myself. If I change something on a website, I want to do it once and have that change ripple through my site with barely a hitch. I don’t want to have to revisit five, ten, twenty pages or templates or – worse – articles and do something similar over and over. I despise having to waste time on maintenance when what’s really important is the written word. To Just Write.
Textpattern allows me to break free of maintenance drudgery and get on with it, rapidly.
I’m sure new CMSs have sprung up since that do things in a similar vein to us, but I’m invested now. Not because I’m resistant to change, but for two primary reasons:
- Because we’re always innovating. Looking around and drawing on the best ideas and making them our own. Or to simply realise there are no better ideas out there and do them properly.
- Because the people here are amazing.
Back when I joined, the welcoming environment on the forum was so far removed from other places, it might as well be from another dimension. Posts by grumpy developers or jaded users, who roll their collective eyes at the newbie and reply with a link to RTFM were barely even a thing.
People here had genuine interest, genuine passion, genuine willingness to help, and as my stupid questions became less stupid and I learnt PHP to start writing plugins, I began to pass that fledgling knowledge on in the same manner.
So, while this post may appear to be about me being Textpattern Twenty, it isn’t. It’s about everyone else circling this project for making me feel at home. The long-suffering people who put up with my late-night coding sessions, and wordy forum posts, and propensity to throw late-breaking features into core three weeks before release. It’s about the people keeping the forum discussions alive, people keeping the plates spinning, and people keeping the spirit of Textpattern founder Dean Allen at the heart of the software.
Anyone who knows me will vouch that I’m not the most structured developer to ever grace the planet, so I’m immensely grateful that the community embrace my tinkering and keep my often wayward ideas under control as we steer this project onward. Textpattern has a level of maturity and world-beating feature-richness that makes me proud to have contributed. But the legacy isn’t just the code, it’s the blueprint for how open-source projects can run and make a difference to the web if every member learns from every other and leads by example.
I’m genuinely excited for the future of Textpattern as we quietly iterate the 4.9.x codebase and start to hammer v5.0 into shape. We’ve come so far, and there’s so much more fun to be had.
It’s been a heck of a twenty-year ride so far, and I’m indebted to every person – past, present and future – who shares the Textpattern spirit and ethos that makes this the friendliest corner of cyberspace I’ve ever known.
Thank you all, truly, for an unforgettable double-decade here, and I look forward to sharing many more years with everyone.
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