On being a Textpattern developer

With the imminent release of Textpattern 4.3.0 — the smartest CMS on the planet — I thought it would be interesting to let you into a little secret: I really enjoy developing for it.

While it’s tough to manage in my spare time between being husband, daddy, sound engineer, literary genius and eccentric — and heartbreaking to say “no, that’s probably better as a plugin” to seemingly worthy core feature requests — I hope the choices I’ve made so far aren’t to the detriment of the product.

It’s quite a balancing act to keep the core light and breezy and aim for the 80:20 rule, because in the back of my mind is always the mantra:

is this feature likely to appeal to 80% or more of the user base while allowing the remaining 20% of hardcore folk who are pushing the web to fabulous new places to do new things and twist the platform beyond its humble boundaries?

My only yardstick is my own experience as a very average site designer. Luckily, what I lack in design skills I can make up for in sheer hackery and bloody-mindedness; the combination of talented designers and coders at TxpBuilders keeps me fresh and always stretches what I thought possible in software.

Late for tea and medals

Unfortunately, Txp 4.3.0 was out much later than I’d hoped. And it was entirely my fault: as well as owning a fabulous pair of ears that can dissect the audio spectrum into the finest detail when mixing music, I’m a hacker and perfectionist by trade and just can’t leave things alone.

A huge part of the delay was due to rigorous testing of Textile 2.2 (more on this soon), and bringing the new admin side markup to the core in an effort to try and smooth the transition between Txp 4.3.0 and Txp 5. The latter involved a lot of discussions with TxpBuilders, forum members, standards advocates, the team looking at Txp5’s interface, and myself (yes, I talk to myself) to come up with something that was semantic, backwards- and forwards-compatible.

I reckon it took the best part of six months of to-and-fro until I finally settled on what is now the 4.3.0 admin side markup soup. And the worst part? It looks almost the same as 4.2.0 to the untrained eye! Rest assured it’s very different and I’ll be writing a detailed article about it in the Documentation at some point.

Developing this monolithic change involved keeping two separate branches running side by side; and a lot of the time I had to manually sync the commits that were going into the official 4.x branch because of code conflicts. Considering I’d never used version control software before, I’m now a command line Level 3 zen master, although I’ve heard that Mercurial and Git are far better at merging changes and branching than SVN.

Managing Txp 5

With 4.3.0 finally having its eyes on the cage door, the next milestone is Txp 5. First the good news: it will not fail where Crockery (Txp 4.1) did. Partly this is due to a planned split in the codebase instead of difficult concurrent branch development, with which I can now wholly sympathise. How the dev team at the time kept it up for as long as they did is beyond me.

Secondly: how do we, as a team of three, manage such a huge undertaking in a timely fashion? Given that my wish list of things to change in Txp 5 is as long as the road down Death Valley, it’s going to be a challenge.

Many proposals have been put forth with varying degrees of severity:

• Phase the release into a series of drops
• Invite other devs to bolster the team
• Encourage more patch submissions: this would probably involve changing the out-dated domo-list subscription model because it feels very tired and unfriendly to me
• Move to a different repo that is more fork-friendly to spawn more widespread community involvement: Github springs to mind
• Organise a hack-a-thon where we invite a tonne of Txpers somewhere and see how much we can get done in a weekend
• Ditch the codebase and use Rails / MVC

I’m sure there are more. At this point I can’t say which, if any, are going to help or hinder development of our beloved toolset; opinions are fiercely divided.

My crystal ball is foggy but I can assure you of one thing: while there is breath in my body and a fire inside me for doing things better in the CMS arena, I am going to continue pushing the Textpattern platform as the designers’ choice for the web.