Boogenstein > Comparing beer to web developent? Do you use beer to produce? Beer is for consumption. Textpattern is for production.

The thing is, the world of tech moves quite fast, probably because the web is a rather young medium. There are plenty of room for improvement in Textpattern, I already went into that in my blog post;-)

Object Oriented support is inexistent, there’s no framework to simplify things (only functions that want to mimic a framework), no testing (rspec hallelujah), nu proper plugin support (you have to hunt them down, nothing like gem for example) and the list can go on. If Textpattern was built on something like CodeIgniter or Django or (double yes for this) Rails, I wouldn’t be replying to this post now.

As a developer/designer that has built all kinds of websites with Textpattern and has been fiddling with TXP plugins for a long time (glz_custom_fields is just one of the bigger plugins that I’ve written, the rest won’t be made public because it’s just too much hassle), I have been frustrated in many ways (both as a coder and as a user) and the answer to all this is simple: port it to Rails, re-write TXP from the ground-up and keep it’s functionality because that’s the 1 thing everyone agrees on.

Yep, the eternal Raveoli himself, all these nicks around the web =)

Lee > ModX, yeah - the totally rewritten version is now in public alpha (beta?) and while I find it’s not for me, I certainly think it packs some punch. It gets some attention.

Imagine if Crockery was also out in public beta now… That would be exciting as well. But, no… Still Textpattern is stuck with maximum two categories for each article, one level deep sections, it bugs me… Textpattern could be so much to so many people.

Dean’s not a messiah, and I don’t see him that way. I think Dean would even tell you himself he’s not a leader and doesn’t care about giving speeches (which makes your attack on him kind of pointless). What Dean is is a talented writer. I like talented writers and that’s why I defend him. Simple as that. All the other stuff he’s given to the web is just freebie I use (and happen to like) but could, if necessary, live without just fine, including Textpattern.

I’m involved with a half dozen sites running Textpattern, one of which will be be the new incarnation of a popular metro-area Deaf community site.

But as I contemplate the launch of yet another site, I find myself being drawn more and more toward MODx. Sorry, Textpattern, but you need to do your business or get off the pot.

I’ve used Textile for years, and Markdown as well, and been very happy using it. I know Dean created Textile. Who doesn’t? And more importantly, have I ever discredited him for creating Textile? No.

TextDrive… Don’t even go there, I had a client with them, and he had trouble with them even a year after he got his refund for an extremely poor experience. If I had to choose between Jason of TextDrive and Jason the horror movie guy, I’d choose the latter, because the former is just plain rude to people (people, check the forums).

I find it rather amusing that Dean has this apparant Messiah-like status, so that most of the comments I get on this blog post (and in the Textpattern forums) are semi-religious-like defence of the highly venerable Dean Allen, who I’ve only named in a bypassing paragraph. I was talking about him in the past tense, so take a chill pill.

Thank you for your comment anyway;-)

It’s all just words and freedom of speech;-)

Dean Allen is the original developer of Textile, arguably the most popular markdown language on the web and since implemented in nearly every major programming language, and benefiting nearly every CMS (including WP).

Dean is founder and former president of TextDrive (now a Joyent company), which he conceived under a risky but brilliant funding strategy that made it a huge success in a fraction of the time most other businees can only dream of. Sure textism.com was pretty much Oliver-focused for a while, but you don’t have a lot of time to blog and knob-polish at conferences when you’re busy running one of the most successful web hosting companies going.

Dean provided some of the earliest articles to A List Apart when it was just past it’s mail list stages; something Zeldman himself, “wrote about recently”:http://www.alistapart.com/articles/tenyears.

He’s back to blogging pretty regularly at textism.com. His site navigation sucks, so it’s hard to find other tricks of his like “Favrd”:http://www.textism.com/favrd/, but that’s Dean, he’s a maverick, a minimalist who doesn’t have to self-aggrandize because he doesn’t give a fuck what you or I think anyway. I like and respect that, personally, and so do many of the folks who make those speaking rounds you allude to.

You can say Textpattern doesn’t have a leader, or whatever, other people have made the same claim, but that’s got nothing to do with Dean Allen, hasn’t for a long time.

But you must admit he’s not quite an industry influencer?

He is and was mostly vocal on his dog (incidentally also called Oliver;-) movies and whatever. Not the visionary thinker who speaks at universities, Google talks, TED talks, web developer / web 2.0 conferences, etc…

That’s not criminal, but it is not something that makes a project take off and gain momentum.