Gina CMS

Gina Content Management System

Where's Dean?

Dean Allen was the founder of the Textpattern project, but hasn’t been seen on the online support forum since 2006-01-16 12:03:44.

The Textpattern project has been running for almost a decade with Dean having the keys to the front door, he owns .com, .net and .org. Precarious position the project is in, since Dean does not respond to any correspondence sent his way.

What does one do? Do we continue trudging along with the hope that Dean remembers to renew the domains come 2017? What if Dean needs the money and decides to sell the domains to the highest domain squatter/link spammer bidder?

We’re in a conversation at present at the support forums, many in the community want a clean break, a new set of domains. I’ve had my say on the forums, it’s up to the core developers to decide the direction they should take.

The core developers are hard at work, coming soon are features like unlimited custom fields, a revamped admin layout and my favorite, Themes. With all these changes afoot, whatever momentum these new releases bring, could be for naught.

Momentum in a project is key, lose it and you’re screwed, you’re back to square one, hey look over here we’ve got a really nice CMS. Textpattern is a well kept secret among web developers, shh, don’t tell anybody. It’s one of the many tools they use to create sites, but it’s off the end-user radar, that’s what I’m hoping to correct.

My hope is that we either gain ownership of the domains from Dean, or we just register a new set of domain names and put redirects at the old ones.


Textpattern