Textpattern forks - for better or for worse?

1 · Rick Silletti

Peter! you missed your calling. With all due respect to TXPMAG it was always a bit fluffy and under challenged. Not only do you accomplish an interview in excellent style, you write a pretty reasonable editorial as well.
If you were to write a weekly column I would read it!

2 · Kameko Rouge

Thanks for the xPattern info. Personally I’m glad theres finally a fork. Can’t wait to see what it can do. Textpattern has been on its death bed for way too long.

Even Jon Hicks, quoted in the Textpattern Solutions book, wants to move away from TXP and to EE already.

Pretty bad when you pick up the book and find out that a month after its released, the lead developer Zem abandoned the futureless TXP and has moved onto Wordpress.

And you can find many examples of Mary closing threads. 6 threads alone in the feedback section are clearly closed. And the majority of those posts offered legitimate points indeed. Another reason I’ve completely left Textpattern.

4 · Guillaume

Way to go turning this into personal matters and adding even more drama.

Don’t turn this into some them vs them war – “Who should I trust ?” kind of thing.

5 · mrdale

wow chicken little, it’s true, the sky is falling.

It’s really much simpler (and less fOX newsy) than all that.

1) Various Plugin Devs and Designers wanting to contribute to TXP in a more open and fluid manner asked for a community SVN branch that would operate within existing TXP resources. Not a fork, but a branch.

2) This request was rejected for a variety of reasons by the core devs.

3) Same group decided to play with the TXP core, as is their right.

Nothing more. I’ve had fun confabs with all three devs on IRC. I respect their work and I’ve made that clear to them. So turning this into high drama is kinda silly.

People are allowed to have disagreements, no? Sometimes when you are OPEN and LISTEN and DISCUSS, everybody wins.

6 · Kameko Rouge

I don’t know if you actually read those closed threads, but the ‘negative trolls’ you’re talking about are/were the very same active, TXP forum posters. Do you really think people like Jon Hicks or CMS connoisseurs like davidm (who has gone to modx) would have left or were interested in leaving TXP if even half of the issues with TXP were actually addressed by the developers?

Even Alexandra of TXPMAG fame has left Textpattern because its turned from an exciting little project to a stale, breathless entity.

The only reason I had stuck with Textpattern for nearly 2 years was because of the promise of Crockery as well as the talented plugin writers (many of which seem to be more interested in xPattern now).

Yet, I think by now everyone in the TXP community is fully aware that Crockery is a myth and is not much more than vaporware.

As for plugins, heres a nice summary by Jeff_K stated in this thread in regards to the state of textpattern :

Although I don’t agree with him on all points, I do feel a bit of his frustration. I guess the strangest part is that many of the features Drew is calling for are being actively pursued by plug-in developers. Yet there does seem to be a bit of disconnect between the really vibrant work going on amongst these coders, and the stagnation of the core software.

That about sums it up perfectly.

8 · Bloke

Easy, tiger! :-)

Manfre has his reasons for feeling the way he does. A whole heap of perfectly good patches have been proposed and rejected, deemed at odds with the “TXP way” of stability over bleeding edge functionality, even if that functionality would on the surface benefit vast swathes of users.

Yet some things I agree are simply better as plugins or mulled over and integrated longer-term into TextPattern. All TXP devs have their reasons for saying yay or nay; all are perfectly valid. Some like it that way; for others that’s not reactive enough. As mrdale said, faced with a choice of submitting patches one knows are unlikely to make it into the core, or forking to take the code to a whole new level… no contest.

As an aside, I don’t see much in the way of censorship in the TXP forum but then I don’t read all the posts. With regards tone, I remember when I first lurked on the forum I thought that zem and mary were borderline rude in some of their replies. Over a short time I came to realise that with the amount of crap they have to wade through from stuff that’s already answered — or repeated questions — a terse “FAQ” and link is not impolite, just uber-efficient for all involved.

TXP is — and remains — the right choice for vast numbers of users. For those that want to rev the engine a bit, xPattern offers the migration path. It’s certainly not one or the other, it’s both.

While I’m totally stoked it is finally going ahead and plan to help in any way I can, I’m not planning on ditching TXP. For some sites I’ve established xPattern is overkill, or the flexibility benefits it offers aren’t necessary. But with one new site in particular I’d begun tikering with, I’ve now shelved development under TXP because I can see it will become soooo much simpler with xPattern under the hood.

As has been echoed already, it’s definitely not us vs them, or anything of that ilk. Both TXP and xPattern devs share code, chat, feature ideas and jokes on IRC. Despite the different approaches, it’s all open source, it’s all shared knowledge, and it’s all good.

10 · hakjoon

I have never understood the perspective that people that contribute plugins, patches, answer questions on the forum, maintain project oriented sites asking for the ability to help more then they already do is somehow perceived as criticism and fault finding.

To each their own I guess. Drama definitely makes for more interesting writing.

12 · Mary

A whole heap of perfectly good patches have been proposed and rejected…

Bloke, can you name these?

I know there are a large number of patches not even looked at yet (they are sitting in Thunderbird). That’s the result of not having a bug tracker, which I am in the process of remedying.

14 · Kameko Rouge

Peter, honestly all you sound like is a fan boy with no real points at all minus a pure cheerleading-on-the-sidelines mentality.

Are you even aware of the “submit a patch” mentality thats been the basis of Textpatterns development for years? Zem had made it quite clear that TXP was a supply and demand system. Meaning if you pay for something, you’ll get it. Otherwise, ‘submit a patch because we’re not getting paid for this’ yadda yadda yadda.

And guess what? Look what happens when you do submit a patch. Even Mary clearly states that * large number of patches are not even looked at yet.*. So why would anyone bother submitting a patch?

I’m going to assume you’re clearly NOT on the developers mailing list OR the completely dead plugin mailing list or else you would actually know what people here have been talking about with no resolve for years now.

15 · colak

@ Kameko Rouge: I clicked on your alias and visited your site which is obviously not txp driven. Not that i believe that this discussion is only for txp users but it just makes one think regarding the motives behind your passionate answers.

@ all: I see xpt not so much as a fork but as an experiment towards one. For that, I am supporting it. This however does not mean that I will migrate. There were other efforts aiming towards alternative development of the txp code and they were all abandoned. Crockery itself can be seen as one such effort which is actually ongoing. For a full on software to move viably to the public realm though, it needs a lot of work. For that software to be maintained for the years to come, it needs a lot of energy and undying enthusiasm.

What worries me is that people who jump ship luck some of those key characteristics. A year ago I did not expect Ruud or Wet to become developers. Before that, I never expected Dean to leave the project either. I strongly believe that we are using a small fraction of the abilities of txp. Yes, there are times we hit walls, but most of those times is because of our ignorance rather than the limitations of the software. This does not imply that I do not believe that there are no limitations with txp but most of the times these can be overcome by stepping back and rethinking what you actually need your site to do.

Admittedly there are areas that the txp core did not touch. These include:

1. Community driven sites – Although the possibility is there, there are still major problems with this including
   • The inability of a member to change their automatically generated password
   • The problem with the images not ‘belonging’ to their author
   • free registration currently possible via Manfre’s plugins
   • etc
2. Multi-lingual sites. Although steve’s plugin filled that gap, I believe that this functionality should be available in the core

Having visited the xpt forum I found that none of the above is enthusiastically addressed and most of the work geared towards the facelift.

17 · Kameko Rouge

Colak, of course the site isn’t TXP driven. Why would it be? If you’ve actually read my posts, I clearly do not support TXP anymore. I’m only here to push the xPattern fork. If you honestly think people actually care about Crockery, please do a poll on the TXP forum and see what people say about it.

Try reading these reviews as well.

Oh and see what happens when you google Whats happening with textpattern? and read the very first link.

And Peter, stop being a complete tool. Mary and Zem have been 100x more rude, negative etc etc on the forums then Manfre or any of those other members have ever been. Why do you think people say things like this?

Many (for my taste too many) of the developers had a tone in their responses that drove me away, every time a little more. No one needs to be friendly, but for me it is important that there is at least a minimum of friendliness when communicating and I do not want to have the feeling that I’m a bug each and every time I pose a polite question. And that is the feeling I had until, well, until I stopped posting alltogether and eventually moving on and leaving TXP behind me.

“current state of development perfection?”. Honestly, stop with the fan boy attitude. It’s pathetic.

18 · Els

Wow, they really ruined your life didn’t they? Poor thing. Do you know that high blood pressure can eventually kill you? You should really try and relax a bit…

I’m really curious about those posts by the devs that you mention; they must be horrible if even you find them rude.

19 · mrdale

Good grief, lets get a grip.

NOTHING IS CHANGING… Other than there may soon be more options. No energy is being diverted from TXP development other than the devs will get to catch up on that backlog of patch submissions.

There’ll be less grousing in the forums cause people who have been frustrated (yes it’s undeniable that there’s been quite a few) now have another project to work on.

Peter I wish you’d let go of your personal rail against Manfre, and let it die. He’s been perfectly respectful of the devs when they check in with xPattern, and it’s all working out.

Either way, I beleive time and code will be the judge of this whole thing and I beleive I’ll have a beer :).

20 · Kameko Rouge

http://placenamehere.com/article/284/MyStateofTextpattern

Look at the comments..even Kevin Potts, one of the authors of Textpattern Solutions has some beef and frustrations with TXP.

So how is TXP in ‘a current state of development perfection’ again?

22 · Gocom

Well, maybe it’s now my time to comment to this issue, as my name is mentioned on the txp forums in this manner etc.

First, this was quite great article, it was nice to read it. Thanks, of shearing your feelings Peter. But, I disagree, a lot, but still good article.

First of all, txp isn’t even really stable if you didn’t know. TXP was published because dean wanted money – quite fast. And also TXP’s version numbers and other are completely dean’s sceme to make even more money.

But I think txp’s devs are good guys/girl, but in some parts the process of txp is stoned. We haven’t seen any big and new after Dean/zem “died” and drop out. Minor fixes yes, but within these years we could have archieved a lot of more.

I have said here on txpq that TXP is the best, and i still think that it is. Devs are great too, but something is missing.

And therefor we are making great and good xpat, that will make those things possible: it makes textpattern to new levels. But it’s it own CMS – basically, fork and in somepoint it will majorly differ from txp: and then it will basically be standalone, new one.

But I’m not leaving anywhere. I will still produce plugins for txp, but i also will work with xpat. That’s because of my work, i do my sites still with txp and because clients require plugins, I will in future make them.

Of one thing more. Yes, i was quiet couple days on txp forum, but that hasn’t nothing to do with xpat – i just was not on feeling of “foruming”.

Maybe we just should be happy of xpat? It will bring something tasty and great :-)

23 · Bloke

Eek, been mad busy preparing for a Trade Show next week and not checked back here. A while ago up the page I said (now I realise badly worded) “A whole heap of perfectly good patches have been proposed and rejected…”

Mary said: “can you name these?”

I now say: nope. I’m not part of the dev mailing list and haven’t the wherewithall to come up with anything useful to humanity that fits in the core so it’ll likely stay that way.

I think I had a point but it got lost in my usual waffle. Must… learn… concise..ness. That and I wasn’t thinking straight. It wasn’t meant in any negative manner, sorry if it sounded that way. (Oh, and great news about the bug tracker: nice one).

What I wanted to say was that there have been a whole heap of posts on the forum about patch ideas (probably from a fairly small hard-core band of folk!); some have undoubtedly made it — Manfre for sure — others have either been discussed and rejected prior to submission, have never been submitted officially, or were rejected after submission for various valid reasons. I don’t know which fall into which camps nor the volume of patches/ideas involved.

When I said “perfectly good patches” I meant in the eyes of the creator, not necessarily that they were good for TXP. Like, we all get caught up when someone says “hey isn’t this cool? So simple, it should be in the core” and a whole bunch of people go “yeah, +1” and then someone comes along and makes us see sense; that it was just emotion clouding reason.

I wasn’t clear about the distinction in my warped head between discussion over some nifty feature that on the surface makes sense vs an official patch submission. Incidentally the word ‘patch’ to me implies fixing something when a lot of the time it’s an enhancement, but that’s just accepted terminology in this crazy industry.

In summary, sorry if my haphazard array of sentences were unfounded/misconstrued. I’m off to school to (re)learn English… and perhaps pick up tips on when to shut up and realise few have any desire to read my baseless tedium!

24 · Mary

Thank you, Stef, I appreciate the clarification. I would hope you and other folks will request proof of such claims when they are made, because they are certainly inflammatory which isn’t acceptable if they are not also true.

We should speak in facts, not FUD. Which I think was what Peter was getting at, but I don’t/won’t speak for him.

It is very easy to accuse of or possibly project ulterior motives, and make grand, inflammatory and accusing remarks, but we should all make the effort to avoid doing so. When we disagree, it is better for the parties to act like adults and do their own thing rather than bitch-slap each other.

25 · Rick Silletti

Allrighty then! out of conflict rises the Phoenix – I think I’ll go have a beer as well.

26 · Reid

I stopped posting in the Txp forums months ago because of all the ambient hostility. So Lord knows why I’d want to contribute to this thread full of it, but I am compelled because no one has contested this statement:

GoCom: “First of all, txp isn’t even really stable if you didn’t know. TXP was published because dean wanted money – quite fast. And also TXP’s version numbers and other are completely dean’s sceme to make even more money.”

I’m sorry, I’ve been using Textpattern since gamma 1.17, two months shy of four years ago, and never have I ever paid one thin dime for it, nor have I ever been asked to pay Dean anything for Txp. It should also be noted Dean’s last commit to SVN was September, 2005. It’s been ages since he’s been around to charge or collect a thing.

So, I do not believe you can provide citations (or your receipts) of actual $$$ charges for Textpattern that were a part of a “scheme to make even more money,” nevermind cite how they tie to version numbers.

27 · DavidONE

Another soul here who had words like ‘controlling’, ‘inflexible’, ‘arrogant’, ‘dictatorial’, ‘non-inclusive’, ‘prima donna’ floating through his when spending time on the Txp forums and subsequently left.

One or two of the devs treat the project and forums like their own little fiefdom instead of an open source project. No thanks.

Not only that, the ‘personality’ of the project has gradually been removed. Even little changes like ‘Dead Letters’ being renamed to ‘Archive’ turns the whole experience to corporate grey.

I wish xPattern the greatest success.

28 · DavidONE

[sigh] “… floating through his head …”

29 · Alfie

I am very knew (in the scheme of things) to TXP, 6 months ago i used it but due to a nummber of reasons i left, many which have been touched on here:

firstly my main “want” from TXP that i couldn’t find was support for dynamic/expanding tree like menus, I registered on the forums and found a post titled: Sub Sections In Crockery,

I asked if there was a version i could test as i was eager to try it out only to be told by a dev: [and i quote]“Nope. It’s ready when it’s ready.
If you need it now, look for a different solution.”

thats not to say that there havnt been helpfull people (as seen here: http://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?pid=161501#p161501) but I find that sort of response a bit blunt..

I keep coming back to TXP to see if subsections (even bought the book) but nothing has changed, i was waiting for crockery but gave up.. AND all the forum posts seem to tail off half way through last year (the ones ive seen).

Most recent reading was this post i stumbled access: http://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?pid=5913#p5913, someone making a legitimate query about subsections and an admin replied with “Can you provide an ‘obvious’ example? Honestly I can’t think of one…” not so bad but still a bit negative.

I honestly want to love TXP, the welovetxp site and the many designers that swear by it makes me want to use it, but it doesnt seems safe to do so ATM, is there a demo of X-PAT as i’d love to see this