I was so onboard with Textpattern that I bought their "lifetime" hosting plan back in the day. Some of you probably remember how that went. Wikipedia says that
"On August 16, 2012, individuals who had provided start-up and development funding to Joyent (and its predecessor, TextDrive) in exchange for lifetime shared hosting accounts with Joyent were informed, via email, that their lifetime hosting accounts would be deleted on October 31, 2012... Customer backlash to the announcement turned out to be fierce."
It was a learning moment for me to never trust companies that promise lifetime anything. Once you surrender your money you are without leverage and a promise is little better than a fart in that situation.
What's with the insistence of running it off of just MySQL? Textpattern being small and lean would IMHO be prime candidate for SQLite.
I used to use txp for my personal blog and couple of client sites back in 200x and have still soft spot for it. Every now and then I take a look but decide not to try it out because I do not have MySQL in my stack and I honestly can't be bothered to set it up just for txp. Any chance it'll going to change?
…which will open up a whole new world of possibilities.
The Textpattern dev team & user base is pretty small, and the user base is largely patient, so Textpattern can sometimes fall into a trap of being 'good enough for now' and go for extended periods of time with few commits. What tends to happen is a release is scheduled, takes place, and then the plans for the next release are more forefront in our minds. The most recent release was nearly two years ago, which is a long time in Textpattern terms, but I'm confident we can get Textpattern 4.9 into the release pipeline this winter. More on that here:
It's from before PDO was a thing, I believe. They have their own "abstraction" on top of mysqli - I'm not sure about the return values, but might be possible to switch in PDO?
I was an early adopter of Textpattern in 2004, and I still have sites running that use it.
Back then it was early in my career, and I used Textpattern as the CMS for a client’s site. I’ll never forget trying to explain Textile markup to the engineer who would be managing the site. To me Textile, like Markdown, was great as shorthand for HTML. Well, but this guy chuckled and shook his head and said it seemed like using MS-DOS for the web. And well, you know what, it kind of is. I like my text-based tools, but that perspective has stuck with me when considering and designing systems for others to use.
I kept Textpattern to myself after that, and eventually hacked it to use Markdown. I don’t know if they’ve made that easier than it used to be, but if they have they ought to have done so years earlier.
Wow! Nostalgia. In the early days of WordPress, I was not fond of using its interface to write articles. Textile was simple, and I could quickly and easily write without touching the "Editing Buttons." I had Textile formats in the text for such a long time that I still find some remnants that missed the conversion to this day. Textile predated Markdown and, to me, felt much more evolved.
"On August 16, 2012, individuals who had provided start-up and development funding to Joyent (and its predecessor, TextDrive) in exchange for lifetime shared hosting accounts with Joyent were informed, via email, that their lifetime hosting accounts would be deleted on October 31, 2012... Customer backlash to the announcement turned out to be fierce."
It was a learning moment for me to never trust companies that promise lifetime anything. Once you surrender your money you are without leverage and a promise is little better than a fart in that situation.