[contrib] Please reward the plugin authors with comments on textpattern.org !

Niloc · 2005-03-21 21:49:29

> davidm wrote:

> bq. Niloc wrote: I think if you look on all the forum threads where the plugins are released you will find lots of comments by users thanking the author and providing suggestions. Is there really a need to post comments on both the forum and textpattern.org? I sure don’t think so since textpattern.org just links back to the forum.

Yeah it’s true that there’s a link back to the forum. I agree the forum should remain the technical discussion around plugins to provide feedback to the plugin writer. But if there’s to be a central repository, I guess comments are a way to provide rating and indicate if and how it has been useful (e.g provide context). Plus I am assuming that newcomers will likely use textpattern.org than the forum (because of the massive amount of data here).

So there is no need per say, but I guess it’s just my view of things. I am the first to agree that the forums and the community here are great, it just struck me that there were no comments on most plugins on textpattern.org.

I agree that textpattern.org is a great site. I just find it more beneficial to use it to find the plugins, and then to post comments on the forum threads that are linked from textpattern.org. I personally don’t check comments on textpattern.org and I don’t think many others do either. Which is why I feel it’s better to use the forum links which are linked from the site.

But that is just my opinion.

davidm · 2005-03-21 21:58:34

Niloc wrote : I agree that textpattern.org is a great site. I just find it more beneficial to use it to find the plugins, and then to post comments on the forum threads that are linked from textpattern.org. I personally don’t check comments on textpattern.org and I don’t think many others do either. Which is why I feel it’s better to use the forum links which are linked from the site. But that is just my opinion.

Now you’re all going to convince me and make me look like a fool ;)
All these points are quite valid.

Maybe then have a rating system for textpattern.org ?

ramanan · 2005-03-22 00:34:21

I don’t think it’s a good idea to clutter textpattern.org with messages like “awesome plugin!!!!”. It just adds noise to the page.

cziggurat · 2005-03-22 01:49:27

Speaking of the forums, I don’t know if any great deal of thought went into the system, but IMHO, <a href=“http://newsboard.unclassified.de/forum.php”>UNB</a> is a whole lot nicer.

Baseline_Benny · 2005-03-22 04:02:18

> nimnix wrote:

> Every textpattern site I’ve made (except one) has details and links to the resources I used to build the site. This is partially because I love all things web-tech related, and partially because I like to give credit where it’s due.

Good idea.

My personal site has a link to textpattern in the sidebar, but doesn’t mention that it’s the CMS used

My business site now has (since reading this thread) a Credits link in the footer.

Over the course of a few days, I’ll update the other sites to include at least one link somewhere.

Niloc · 2005-03-22 07:02:17

> cziggurat wrote:

> Speaking of the forums, I don’t know if any great deal of thought went into the system, but IMHO, <a href=“http://newsboard.unclassified.de/forum.php”>UNB</a> is a whole lot nicer.

Care to be a little more specific?

alicson · 2005-03-24 02:50:08

wow. this is the first time i’ve seen this thread.
so that’s why that little flurry of commenting happened…
thanks David :) Very thoughtful of you.

> Anark wrote:
I’ve been to Textpattern.org before. I remember I was clicking around, without any success, to find out who was behind the site. That’s all I remember about it; for some reason I just never wanted to go back there because all the action seems to happen here on the TXP boards. What is Textpattern.org’s mission? How does it fit into the big picture?

did you visit the About page? About This Site?
I didn’t want to emphasize the author behind the site, because it’s meant to be a community site with collaborative content. The site is open to anyone to very easily register and immediately begin posting either one’s own mods and templates, or someone else’s tutorials and plugins. But my name is mentioned on that About page if anyone really wanted to know. And I thought I mentioned the “please feel free to email” link too many times..

Suggestions on improving the site are always welcome, and I can think of several ways to make it better myself, but haven’t quite gotten to it… But anyone could easily drop an email saying, “maybe you could add breadcrumbs?” or better yet, “hi, i’d like to help… could you authorize my username on the site to work on the forms so that i can add breadcrumb navigation?”

But the main thing about it is content. A consistently significant number of people visit and use the site every day. A very good number of people have registered on the site. A fair number of those people have posted plugins/tutorials/etc.. But most of the posts are put up by myself, because… well, because others aren’t doing it. The value of a resource site is that it’s a main place you can go for answers; the more resources that are documented in a consistent format there, the more useful the site and more accessible the information. However, this site was never meant to replace or compete with the forum.

Regarding comments on the Resource site:
at first all comments were turned off, except for those articles that did not point out to either the forum or the original author’s site. But through some emails from others, I decided it was sensible to open all comments, and just clearly state (at the comment form) that if there is a forum or information URL above, you’ll probably want to poste your comments/questions there. Right now, comments on textpattern.org are not paid much attention, because people don’t use them. but if you’ve used the plugin (for example) in question, and you know it works on Txp g1.19, you could post that comment. Or post how you used it on your site. Anything like that could be useful or interesting to the next person who glances at that article on the site.

One issue with comments is that they get mailed back to the author of the post… since i’ve been posting a lot of the entries, the original author will never receive that email, because the original author didn’t post it. maybe a plugin can be made to point to a custom field to indicate which email to send comments too. ‘Subscribe to comments’ would also be a very good feature to have here.

But there are lots of little things like that which would be good to have…
When this site was being built, part of my thinking was that it could serve as somewhat of an example site in some regards; since there’s a clear list of what plugins and mods are used on the site, people can see what is doable with textpattern and can access the additional resources that make those things possible. This really is meant to be a community thing.

So, about the Resource site:
help me. help me add articles; help me rework the design so that it’s easier for people to navigate; help me organize it better than the existing type and category Archives and sections if you have suggestions.

And thank you to everyone who has been supporting the site either by working on it directly, or through spirit — I really haven’t been doing it all alone.

*edit: removed an ‘e’
p.s. sorry this post’s so terribly long… but by the time i found it, this thread was terribly long! ;)

Last edited by alicson (2005-03-24 02:53:58)

nimnix · 2005-03-24 04:37:26

I’d contribute, but I still feel like I don’t know enough about Txp to say “here’s how you do this”…

Especially since a lot of my stuff is very hacky, and then someone comes up with a plugin, or there’s a tag I didn’t know, that achieves the same effect. If anyone ever asks how I do something I have no problem telling them, but I’d hate to write something misleading.

davidm · 2005-03-24 07:29:30

Alicson, thanks for your insights and comments about textpattern.org

Before Anark made his comment and I checked to give him the adress of the about page, I realized that you didn’t have to be the author to submit plugins, mods, templates…

So I immediatly registered, and you can count on me to help you.
I think the first thing to do is adding new items to make it as comprehensive as we can. I’ll try to add 5 every day. (Imagine what we could achieve if only ten of us were doing the same !)

Even if responses on this thread have made me think about my initial reaction on the lack of comments on textpattern.org, I still think it will become a ressource when the community has grown beyond the “core” skillful passionnate people here.

With 1.0 out, more people will get curious and the spread of textpattern will grow. Beginners/newcomers, curious about TxP will most certainly try to have a picture of what resources are available (most of the time, they’ll start with templates, then with plugins and localization for those concerned). I don’t think they’ll be able to sort the huge amount of not so structured info here on the forum (title do not always reflect the real subject of one post).

How often did you discover a plugin through a fellow textpatterner and say “I had no idea such a great plugin existed” ? It happened to me many times. The point is not, I repeat, to say the forum is not a great place. It’s the locomotive of this community.

nimnix · 2005-03-24 08:19:33

I like the organization of textpattern.org. It’s pretty straightforward. Good work :)

andreas · 2005-03-24 09:02:45

I just wanted to add some more plugins when I realised that there is already a huge number of them on textpattern.org; what I didn’t realise so far was that in the plugins section there are more than 3 pages and that you have to use “previous” to get to the older ones;

I’d been looking at the plugnis section regularly but since it seemed to me that there are no new plugins and always three pages of them I didn’t bother.

Would you agree that the total number of pages should be made clear in the bottom nav?

davidm · 2005-03-24 09:19:01

Andreas, I have also started to check for missing plugins, and indeed there are already à lot of plugin, 129 to be exact, on textpattern.org.

My method is the following :

I go to the archive
I am checking plugins author by author first by running a search of each author in the plugin section of the forum versus the list in the archive
when a plugin is missing, I check it out and get all the relevant info

I have done tmacwrig and osei so far and got 12 missing plugins, which I will add shortly. First I have to check that some of those are not integrated in 1.0, and run through threads to check issues, revision, dropped or not plugin, broken links… whatever relevant info there might be.

When I am done with the author method, I’ll check the forum for the remaining plugin.

As for the bottom nav displaying the total number of pages, it would be nice, yes (but I don’t know yet if the plugin has this feature).

Last edited by davidm (2005-03-24 09:21:34)

alicson · 2005-03-24 16:55:38

David, thanks so much.. your enthusiasm is very appreciated.

nimnix, thanks for the compliment.. and about hesitating to post things because the information might be too elementary or incorrect — i don’t think any minor hacks or little tips can be too elementary or small to be useful to others. and if in doubt about validity, run it through the forum and see if anyone claims a better way.. but i think it’s better to have the information posted and available for others to either use or to correct, instead of that information not being available at all.

i has kind of surprised me how many things i’ve come across that are not mentioned on the foru at all — if not at the forum, then where would we find it?
to date, textpattern.org has 129 plugins, 33 mods and hacks, 18 templates and references thereto, 21 tutorials, and 30 tips. that’s a pretty good collection, i think, but it definitely needs to be more complete (and information updated along the way) to be the most reliable first-stop resource.

the Resource site has been thoroughly useful just for myself…
whenever i need a plugin or want to check documentation or need links, i just pull up the Archive list or run a quick search on the site, and it generally has the answer or can point me to it. if it’s not there, then i try to find it elsewhere and add it so that it will be easily accessible for me (and everyone else, of course) next time.

and as I said, there are a number of changes that could/should be made to the site when possible.. some are cosmetic and organizational but several are functional things that will probably need new plugins or mods.. (questions and suggestions are always invited.) but meanwhile, content really is the most important thing.

Last edited by alicson (2005-03-24 20:08:34)

nimnix · 2005-03-24 16:59:15

One thing that seems to be missing is which version of Textpattern these plugins will work with. A lot of them were written for pre-RC3 builds and either will not work or are not necessary with RC3.

If I had RC3 (I know…appalling that I don’t, I’m working on it), I’d help test these things.

I’m actuallly using a plugin that was missing from the list (because the link is dead now), a punbb info plugin that pulled stats from the forum.

Boy is it a nightmare trying to move an old plugin from one database to another.

***

I found plugins through textpattern.org I didn’t even know about. Maybe a more formal submission process is in order? From my experience (Quality Assurance infects everything), documentation should go through a form of fact-checking. While this is difficult to organize in a community-run project like this, at some point it should be done.

Of course, I guess comments on the articles will help article authors know whether their work is correct, or there’s a better way, etc.

I’ll go run my tip through the forum then…no better fact-checking than that eh?

Last edited by nimnix (2005-03-24 17:07:52)

alicson · 2005-03-24 17:00:46

regarding posting plugins: if you know what versions of textpattern they can run on, please do post that… otherwise, don’t dwell on it as the information will turn out. if the plugin does not work on RC3/1.0, it should still be posted! just clearly state that it will not work on version xx, or does work on version xx (if you know that information).

andreas, thanks for mentioning that; i will figure a brief way to put the number section articles on each page… maybe sometime soon there can be a small blitz movement to revamp the structure of the site…

meanwhile, what are your recommendations for making the Archive link clear and inviting? because that’s probably the most useful page right now (and search is essential too)..

*edit: i added the article count to the section navigation at the top… do you think that works? will it become apparent enough that the count refers to the number of articles?

Last edited by alicson (2005-03-24 17:19:00)

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#16 2005-03-21 21:49:29

Re: [contrib] Please reward the plugin authors with comments on textpattern.org !

#17 2005-03-21 21:58:34

Re: [contrib] Please reward the plugin authors with comments on textpattern.org !

#18 2005-03-22 00:34:21

Re: [contrib] Please reward the plugin authors with comments on textpattern.org !

#19 2005-03-22 01:49:27

Re: [contrib] Please reward the plugin authors with comments on textpattern.org !

#20 2005-03-22 04:02:18

Re: [contrib] Please reward the plugin authors with comments on textpattern.org !

#21 2005-03-22 07:02:17

Re: [contrib] Please reward the plugin authors with comments on textpattern.org !

#22 2005-03-24 02:50:08

Re: [contrib] Please reward the plugin authors with comments on textpattern.org !

#23 2005-03-24 04:37:26

Re: [contrib] Please reward the plugin authors with comments on textpattern.org !

#24 2005-03-24 07:29:30

Re: [contrib] Please reward the plugin authors with comments on textpattern.org !

#25 2005-03-24 08:19:33

Re: [contrib] Please reward the plugin authors with comments on textpattern.org !

#26 2005-03-24 09:02:45

Re: [contrib] Please reward the plugin authors with comments on textpattern.org !

#27 2005-03-24 09:19:01

Re: [contrib] Please reward the plugin authors with comments on textpattern.org !

#28 2005-03-24 16:55:38

Re: [contrib] Please reward the plugin authors with comments on textpattern.org !

#29 2005-03-24 16:59:15

Re: [contrib] Please reward the plugin authors with comments on textpattern.org !

#30 2005-03-24 17:00:46

Re: [contrib] Please reward the plugin authors with comments on textpattern.org !

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