Gina CMS

Gina Content Management System

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You reached for the secret too soon

Almost a decade has passed since I came upon Textpattern, this wonderful CMS, such a thrill it’s been to create sites with it. My use of Textpattern has been mostly on a personal level, though I’ve made sites for family and friends.

By trade I am a programmer, green screen background, coding hours on end in smoke filled rooms, thick heavy manuals was our Google. So by the time I arrived in Textpattern land, I had already started winding down, I just wanted to throw up some sites for myself.

But being on the digital side of things for most of my adult life, I saw the potential in Textpattern, if only it was more end-user friendly. As a programmer in the early days, you had to build systems an end-user could understand and work with, or else you lost your contract.

So I got involved in the Textpattern project, or as WordPress puts it, make.

You cried for the moon

Yesterday morning I made my last post on the Textpattern forums, on a core code change that would help kick start the Theming revolution, and hopefully entice more end-users towards Textpattern.

This particular change to the core code was something I had brought up over 8 years ago when I started laying out a Theme mechanism for Textpattern. Eight years ago, stop and read that again, 8 whole years waiting for a change in attitude by the core devs. But no, this is the way we’ve done it from the days of Dean Allen, he’ll surface soon.

Four years ago I had given up, took a break from it, got tired of one sentence replies from the head core dev, after having spent 20 minutes on a forum post, laying out an idea. I guess I was crying for the moon, I guess I wanted to see Template Tags in more people’s hands, I guess I wasted my time.

Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun

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