Revisiting Textpattern
rubenerd.com
rubenerd.com
"On August 16, 2012, individuals who had provided start-up and development funding to Joyent (and its predecessor, TextDrive) in exchange for lifetime shared hosting accounts with Joyent were informed, via email, that their lifetime hosting accounts would be deleted on October 31, 2012... Customer backlash to the announcement turned out to be fierce."
It was a learning moment for me to never trust companies that promise lifetime anything. Once you surrender your money you are without leverage and a promise is little better than a fart in that situation.
For clarity: TextDrive was the hosting organisation, Textpattern is the CMS.
Man. What a throwback to the TextDrive days.
Thanks for the links. Sad day. Dean was a great human.
Happy to answer any questions as best I can!
Further reading:
I love it (and think it’s based on the defunct FluxBB)
Thanks so much.
I used to use txp for my personal blog and couple of client sites back in 200x and have still soft spot for it. Every now and then I take a look but decide not to try it out because I do not have MySQL in my stack and I honestly can't be bothered to set it up just for txp. Any chance it'll going to change?
https://github.com/textpattern/textpattern/blob/ef91076b7199...
I think the most honest answer here is that it's planned but not scheduled. There's an open issue to update Textpattern to PDO:
https://github.com/textpattern/textpattern/issues/345
…which will open up a whole new world of possibilities.
The Textpattern dev team & user base is pretty small, and the user base is largely patient, so Textpattern can sometimes fall into a trap of being 'good enough for now' and go for extended periods of time with few commits. What tends to happen is a release is scheduled, takes place, and then the plans for the next release are more forefront in our minds. The most recent release was nearly two years ago, which is a long time in Textpattern terms, but I'm confident we can get Textpattern 4.9 into the release pipeline this winter. More on that here:
Back then it was early in my career, and I used Textpattern as the CMS for a client’s site. I’ll never forget trying to explain Textile markup to the engineer who would be managing the site. To me Textile, like Markdown, was great as shorthand for HTML. Well, but this guy chuckled and shook his head and said it seemed like using MS-DOS for the web. And well, you know what, it kind of is. I like my text-based tools, but that perspective has stuck with me when considering and designing systems for others to use.
I kept Textpattern to myself after that, and eventually hacked it to use Markdown. I don’t know if they’ve made that easier than it used to be, but if they have they ought to have done so years earlier.
And then of course I switched to Pollen.
I don't think TextPattern as a CMS caught on!