Professional Web Developer, Apprentice Photographer
Drew McClellan has just posted The State of Textpattern over on his site. Drew is not a core TXP developer, but a long time user who has seen the product change and change hands over its life. His concerns are no surprise to me, as we’ve often gone back and forth over IM trying to ease each other’s frustration with the state of the project.
I think Drew has covered most of my frustrations in his State of Textpattern address. I’ve been using it since the Place Name Here redesign in late 2004, and evaluated it for other projects before and used it since. In that time there are some enhancements to the sites I’ve done via other’s plugins, plugins written myself after I’ve seen a need, times when I’ve done things simply to participate in the community and make it look like it had some life [like the theme contest and been in the code enough to know how it works and make a fair amount of my own customizations.
But as time has passed, like Drew, I find myself both concerned and hesitant about continuing to contribute in any way, or keeping it in future plans for my own sites.
I’ve just updated my microformat plugin for the textpattern CMS and blogging tool. This update is a maintenance fix to add support for Textpattern v1.0.4 and some changes made in the way tag helpers are built. Users of older versions of TXP should stick with the 1.0 version of the plugin.
Hey look, I did it!
After roughly six months of sitting on a design I was happy with I’ve found both the time and ambition to finish building an update to Place Name Here. Not quite sure what version of the site this is, but 6 seemed like a good number when I started.
Like with all previous versions of the site the new layout is fairly simple, and doesn’t use a lot of images or tricks to play things up. This site always proves to be difficult to rebuild in a uniform way because of the patchwork of different side projects, and technical demos that have been posted since the site first launched in late 1998. The new design and slightly rearranged navigation will hopefully help give a better perspective of what is hiding on the site.
I’ve just upgraded the code behind both Place Name Here and ChunkySoup.net to the latest version of Textpattern. The upgrade was smooth though there were some gotchas with minor tag changes as some updates needed to my custom patches. Ultimately the changes look like they’re all for the better. Plugin updates are next, but they may take a little time [week or two i guess] so if you’re relying on any of my plugins let me know and I’ll try and move them up in the queue.
I’m happy to announce the release of version 1.0 of my Textpattern Microformat plugin pnh_mf. This release adds support for the hReview microformat and works in a few small bug fixes. Downloads and change notes available from the pnh_mf page.
I’ve added some basic tagging support to posts here in anticipation of a few bigger changes I’ve got planned. The upgrade came via installation of the tru_tags plugin for textpattern and a few other feed hacks. If something looks off somewhere, or if feeds aren’t working properly please post a comment.