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A kinder, gentler Textpattern
My email to the Textpattern development mailing list on October 30, 2011:
Early this year on January 24, I sent an email to this list laying out my plans to mod the core so as to make it easier for template installation. Around the same time the plans for TXP5 were announced, I kept plugging away with my ideas but I decided to hold back somewhat until I had a better handle on the future of Textpattern.
Here we are almost into September, and I’m feeling the itch again.
How I see things:
a) The primary audience for Textpattern are web developers. Like a carpenter building kitchen cabinets, they never put “Built by Craftsmen” on their finished work.
b) The end user base is almost nonexistent. Let’s call them the IKEA crowd, they’ll redo their kitchen and then blog about it to no end, with pictures.
This is where I come in, I’d like to build up an end user base around a more user friendly Textpattern. I want to cater to this IKEA crowd, those wanting to build it themselves and learn a thing or two along the way.
Like I mentioned in January, I’m going to use the txp:tag domains for this new project:
txptag.com – the home page explaining this new project. I’m also going to offer a conversion service, send me a link to a freely available XHTML template and I’ll convert it for a small fee.
txptag.net – a user support forum, it will also be used for downloads of templates and plugins.
txptag.org – holds the template tags at present, and it’s getting used! I’m adding a wiki to it, howto’s for creating your own template or converting existing ones, etc.
By this time you must be saying to yourself, yeah so what? Well, I’ve always been upfront with the Textpattern project, I think that’s the way to do things, rather than be secretive about things, I have nothing to hide.
Learning from the xPattern experience, this will be the only mention of this new project on any Textpattern resource. I’m not about to go on the forum to say anything and be told to get off the lawn and all that.
I’ll continue to follow the Textpattern project and point TxPlanet.net at it, though I plan on using the TxPlanet.com and TxPlanet.org domains to promote this new project, we’ll see how word of mouth can work.
txp:tag – a kinder, gentler Textpattern
rockin'
