Textpattern Developer Stef Dawson talks Textpattern features, latest releases and plans to record a hit record!

October 12, 2011 at 1:45 pm, Category: Featured, Interview, Programming, Web Development, by elly

Stef Dawson, is a developer for Textpattern, an open source CMS for ‘website architects’. Bloke, as this Textpattern creative is known on the Textpattern forums, describes himself as a musician, sound engineer, Textpattern programmer, photographer, chump and all-round bloke.

In this interview Stef talks to us about the stand out features of Textpattern and it’s future development,  how the Textpattern community shapes the development of Textpattern, and his love of music and plans to record a hit record!

How would you sell Textpattern to a developer who doesn’t know what it is/does?

Textpattern is for website architects; those people who know the craft of HTML and CSS and want a clean separation of content and presentation for their clients.

Instead of using PHP code during design, Textpattern employs XML-style tags to inject dynamic content such as article titles, body, comments, images, etc into your HTML templates — which Textpattern calls _Pages_. You customise each tag’s output with various attributes exactly as you do with HTML tags. For example <txp:article_image wraptag=”div” class=”main-pic” /> outputs the <img…> tag associated with the currently-viewed article, wrapping it in a <div> with the given class.

This approach makes it very simple for visually-centred designers to create the look they require using one or two tags that would otherwise take a few lines of, possibly alien-looking, code to achieve. Of course, if you wish to drop in a few lines of PHP, Textpattern permits that, but no PHP gets in the way unless it’s desired—thanks to the power and versatility of Textpattern tags. In fact, versatility is Textpattern’s greatest asset; it can do one-page sites, heavy traffic blogs, photoblogs, or serve thousands of articles on a company’s customer-facing site. And each site is as unique as the designer who created it.

In the context of PHP CMSs where do you feel Textpattern succeeds where others such as Drupal/Wordpress fail?

Not to say those other systems fail, but Textpattern’s strengths are its lightweight design, versatility, and library of powerful tags. One doesn’t have to be a PHP coder to do amazing things with it. Right out of the box, Textpattern provides only what’s necessary for designing and maintaining sites. The first screen you see is the _Write_ page. “Just Write” is the unofficial motto to which we adhere. From there, the sky’s the limit, and there are usually many ways to reach it.

Joomla, Drupal and WordPress, to name a few, pack a lot more standard features in. People who like a lot of rainy-day features may perceive Textpattern as not being feature-rich. On the other hand, economy-minded designers—who only regularly use 10% of their CMS’s UI, or find themselves having to chop things out—will love Textpattern, which allows them to go straight to creating.

Textpattern does things well for the majority of sites you may wish to build, yet if you want to go further there are a wealth of plugins available; from the functional (gravatar support, twitter integration …) to the bizarre (Chuck Norris quotes, football league manager). If a plugin doesn’t exist for whatever reason, a simple request to the responsive community is normally all it takes for someone to write one.

What is your favourite feature of Textpattern?

With my coder’s hat on it would have to be the ease with which it can be extended through plugins. I’ve written my fair share of what others have lovingly termed “Swiss army knife” plugins that can be applied to a broad array of situations: from extending Textpattern’s tag suite to test “if this and that, then take action”, right up to administration systems for completely reconfiguring Textpattern’s user/group and privilege structure.

From a design standpoint though, my favourite part is the way it allows me to rapidly take a graphical design brief and turn it into reality, sometimes returning a rough mock-up of a functioning site within a few hours. That’s a real boon for clients as they can play with it immediately, and the shorter feedback loop helps get things done faster. The cherry on the cake is when I show them how to manage their own content and within a couple of clicks they “get it”.

What are the limitations of Textpattern? Are there certain types of sites where you wouldn’t recommend using it?

For those who like to create themes and share them, and others who like the instant results theme-switching provides, Textpattern might be considered lagging behind because there is no real one-click mechanism in Textpattern upon which theme building and sharing often relies. This is less of an issue in the corporate world, where design centers around brands and consistency, but for bloggers and weekend webmasters who, for example, wake up one morning and want to install the “purple samurai slash” theme… well, it may not be as automatic as they like. You can think of Textpattern as a specialised tool that craftspeople use to build high-quality custom products.

Adding to the blog-versus-CMS confusion is that article commenting is turned on by default out of the box in Textpattern. “Is it a CMS or a blogging tool?” In reality it’s both, as with pretty much any CMS, but the perception isn’t clear for newcomers. We’re working to change that impression in our communication efforts, and our upcoming “Sites Exhibit” will help with demonstrating good examples of different sites beyond the “blog” genre.

To date there is no type of site I have encountered where I’ve had to look for a different CMS for the job. If Textpattern doesn’t quite do what I want, I can create a plugin to do it. It also integrates well with other software if you have a particular suite upon which a client insists.

Some types of sites do require a lot of plugins; community-driven sites with login, account registration, and e-commerce elements are an example. While they can be achieved by combining plugins, and tailored to exact requirements, there is no one-stop “e-commerce” module or a “discussion board / forum” module. If your client demands these features they take planning, so if you’re averse to a bit of graft you might do well to look elsewhere.

What role does the Textpattern Community play to help shape the features and functions of Textpattern?

The community is immeasurably valuable, and an amazing bunch of friendly and talented people. While feature requests may not always be met with open arms due to trying to keep Textpattern lightweight, we aim to consider everything. Patch submissions are always welcome. Ultimately, I think our community appreciates the core developers’ adherence to focusing on the essentials as they apply to a greater scope of use and audiences, and let features and specialisations be created as community plugins.

There are bands of early-adopters and SVNers who run each release through the mangle so we can maintain the quality our users and clients expect. In fact, I know a fair few who are so confident in the software’s stability that they run live sites using the development branch codebase; that says a lot about our efforts!

With the upcoming move to Textpattern 5, the developers in the community will play an even more vital role as we migrate from version 4’s function-based approach to a more modern paradigm. We are going to encourage people to branch the code, work on a feature and issue a pull request to have it incorporated directly into the core; a much more collaborative approach to coding than the traditional “closed shop” to which people have become accustomed. This won’t change our focus and commitment to quality, stability, security and a nimble footprint, it will just enable more people to be directly involved and should speed development.

What was the key focus when developing Textpattern CMS 4.4.1?

Security. While we don’t know of any sites that have used Textpattern exploits for nefarious purposes, the fact they were there made us nervous.

A lot of work went into the 4.4.0 and 4.4.1 releases in a very short space of time to address the security issues that were raised over unchecked values and possible CSRF attacks. We are very grateful to all people who highlight security flaws that allow us to make a stronger piece of software.

What are the future plans for Textpattern?

The next major milestone is Textpattern 5 which has unfortunately been slow off the starting grid due to time constraints and other commitments by the core team. We considered opening the codebase up straight away so we could leverage the community spirit surrounding the announcement of our intentions, but decided to hold back—rightly or wrongly—until some of the library functions were completed and a few screenfuls of code were in place.

The main drive was to iron out the kinks in our logic and make sure the approach we were taking was going to actually work. The last thing we want to do is waste people’s time and create something that presents a difficult upgrade path, or one in which 90% of plugins break on day one.

The breather also gives us time to document the process, to offer guides for developers on our decisions. Those decisions, of course, can be challenged (and we encourage this from the many experienced programmers in our community), but we figured a unified direction would be better than a zillion different approaches from which we’d have to pick one, despite the longer timescales we’ve had to endure.

Moving to a more modern framework means enhanced power for plugin authors and themers, and allows new features to be built-in more rapidly. The more compartmentalised approach to the core should also mean fewer incompatibilities or bugs arising when changes are made.

There are also big gears turning behind the scenes in our plugin repository, textpattern.org. Again due to time constraints and everyday life this project has been on ice for far too long. In the last few weeks things have started moving again with some new talent helping improve the design and workflow, so we’re hoping to bring Phase One of the project from under wraps fairly soon.

Can you tell us a bit about TXP Magazine and the relaunch of this?

The magazine was started in early 2005 by Alexandra Labudda, a community member, and it ran for almost four years with a skeleton crew—an amazing feat, really. When the project ran aground it remained beached until just these last few weeks. We have since taken ownership of the txpmag.com domain and the site is now considered an integral part of the Textpattern family.

With this change in status, the magazine has a “change in focus”: a new Editor-in-Chief, Destry Wion, whose standing in the community and considerable talents will help drive fresh content into the site. He is putting together an editorial team to tackle the task of bringing a business-oriented periodical to fruition and it’s exciting to see it taking shape.

We are planning to revamp the site “Live” so the direction it is heading can be seen incrementally as we head towards the first new issue. Updates will be available via the magazine’s Twitter account, “@txpmag”. We’ll use other social channels like Google+ and our Facebook page to help with recruiting; staffing regular magazine roles, auditing and curating associated content resources, and other tasks Destry will be announcing soon.

Are there any other projects apart from Textpattern in the pipeline from you and your team?

I have plenty of sites I want to get online, some of which relate directly to my love of language and music; I intend to get back to spending more time in the recording studio within the next few years. With the explosion of online showcase sites like SoundCloud it’s a great time to reach audiences that the traditional music industry has kept locked out for years. Building a following using SoundCloud, YouTube, Google+, Facebook and Twitter is now eminently achievable if you have the drive to see it through.

After all, why save for a pension when I have the capacity to write a hit record without being chained to an archaic recording contract, and can live off the royalties into my retirement? It’s what all the cool cats do

I would like to say thank you to Stef for taking the time to talk to us.

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