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 don’t use the product in my typical day to day web development duties [projects are bigger, using other often custom frameworks or languages besides PHP] but I occasionally find myself with time outside of work that I could offer to the project if the motivation was there.

When motivation and time align – the occasional contributor

The times in the past when both motivation and time have aligned and I’ve made contributions like the microformat plugin. The times more recently when that has been the case, were time and motivation to revise my plugins or look for other things to enhance [hAtom templates or OpenID as examples], I haven’t had enough confidence in the project to justify the effort. “Big” changes that have been talked about forever like admin side redesigning or the decision to include [or not] a particular JS library would have a big impact on how I should approach my code and what features I think are a priority. With no development roadmap in sight [again not a timeline, just a commitment to features or general development direction] and no assurances that what has been done in the so called experimental branch will be there next week I find it impossible to plan my own contributions.

And that’s my own biggest area of frustration for the last few months. My investment in any particular product on my own blogs is light. I could jump to WP or EE or some other solution in a weekend and be done with TXP and onto plotting how to address my peeves with the new platform. The investment in a product that others might be downloading and using is a bit more difficult for me to abandon.

The wrong things take work

As much as the direction [or lack there of] is a concern, its only the latest symptom of a something that has always plagued textpattern.

The way product development has been handled since it was opened up to a larger, more open team, has always been difficult to follow. It is a chore to cover the forums, blogs and mailing lists on a regular basis. That their use by the core team go in spurts and ultimately most of the insight into the product comes in the form of replies to inquiries on the forums or individual code checkins only makes it more difficult. Unless it is your job to do so and you’re building sites with TXP on a day to day basis, the commitment that needs to be made before one can just jump in and be a productive contributor has been too great.

Its nice that a core team has formed over time and they’re now looking for ways to sustain themselves, but I agree 100% that its the the lack of open direction, and the occational feeling from some contributors that direction doesn’t need to be or is somehow in a state of development where it cannot be stated that has me concerned and questioning continued use and support of textpattern.

I’ve seen an increase in spam comments, or fishy comments with short semi-on-topic quips that I can only suspect are left as spam. [Yes, thank you, I’m glad you like my blog and think its interesting and informative]. As a result I’ve resorted to turning on comment moderation / manual approving of messages until I have more time to investigate solutions.

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.

Future updates to the plugin are planned to add additional microformats support, expand the flexibility of the tag helpers and to streamline the underlying PHP code. If you’re using this plugin — or have chosen not to — please help by posting a comment letting me know how well you think it fits into your writing style.

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.

Though not glitzy, there are a few tricks hiding in the new design which I’ll cover in detail in a future post. One element in particular is the code used to create a “liquid” like layout via JavaScript. If you are reading this and seeing a two column layout the left column is made of content that has been pulled out of the main column and repositioned to fill the gap on the left. This is similar to using floats where content will stack if there isn’t enough room to go side by side, but in this method I can pull content from anywhere in the flow of the main column depending on the given page — introduction content from the top, extra content from the bottom, or something I’d like to highlight from the middle.

Another new site feature is the beginning of better integration with the aggregated content on Place Name Where?. This can be seen in the combined tag searches found on pages such as the PHP tag page. This was really what I build the mechanics behind PNW for, but hadn’t gotten to any implementation before this redesign.

More about the guts of the site can be found in the updated colophon. Please take the new look for a spin and let me know what you think in the comments.

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’ve also made some minor template tweaks which you probably won’t notice. BUT if you do see anything odd please drop a comment below.

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.

hReview is the most complex format included so far. Though straight forward, the format calls for defining the thing (event, company, product) you’re reviewing by including one of a few different other microformats. So like I’ve done previously with hCard + adr to add the tags needed for an hReview + hCard or hReview + hCalendar is a two step process.

As always, if you have questions about what type of information is expected in each microformat consult the plugin help docs via the TXP admin interface or microformats.org and if you have questions about the plugin ask away in the comments here or on this thread on the textpattern forums.

Aside from bug fixes or small usability related tweaks, this will be the last release until I can find time to work on enhancing Textpattern’s built in tag builder and make some of the input forms more flexible—taking care of these nesting cases more cleanly as well as providing easier input for names, dates and other details.

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.

The templates on ChunkySoup.net aren’t yet updated, but if you’re on Place Name Here you should see a tag list at the bottom of this post.