Gina CMS

Gina Content Management System

Hiatus

Took a 3 year hiatus, carpal tunnel is cured, hallelujah.

Textpattern

3 years of commits and quite a number of changes, I’m on TXP 4.6.2 and the stable branch is at 4.8.3. From what I see it’s mostly theme support, I’ll have to kick the tires and take it for a test drive.


TXP Lite

Hear me out, I’m not a web developer, I don’t obsess over CSS statements, if it works ok got it. Would I like to be a web developer? Not really, I’ve forgotten more programming languages than most people learn in one career. The flavor of the month seems to be happening now, learn this, no that, no thanks.

Ok, so I don’t want to be a web developer, but I still want to put up sites. I want to own my data, very important, and I want it to be easy to setup and maintain. Textpattern geared to the newbie, I think, would be a hit.


Form Types

Textpattern form types serve no purpose other than to organize forms. When I started using Textpattern 15 years ago, it was the form types that confused the hell out of me. My conclusion after many years was that form types could be used as a method to group forms belonging to a Theme. Actually, I prototyped this, kind of a hack, but it worked.


KISS

This Textpattern site you are perusing uses 1 Page, 1 Style and multiple forms. If you take this approach toward themes, the backend simplifies, and the correlation of Pages and Forms becomes clearer. A theme called let’s say Blog, would have a Blog page and Blog style, it’s associated forms would be under the form type Blog created when the theme was imported or manually created in the backend.


No Way

When I suggested the above scenario in the forums, it was not looked upon favorably. It seems like Web Developers use form types, because they maintain sites which are rather complex. But I’m not in that category, I could use a TXP Lite, and I know many people who would benefit from such a codebase.


Tide is Turning

The populace is coming to the conclusion that social media sucks balls. They want to own their own data, but don’t want to jump through hoops to move it somewhere else. Their only alternative now is egads Wordpress, millions of poorly coded sites are online right now infecting the web. You should see my Apache logs, one WP exploit try after the other, it sucks.


Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what’s puzzling you
Is the nature of my game


Textpattern