The Return to Textpattern, and TextBook

22 August 08

Textpattern developers will tell you that Textpattern users need to write more about their success with Textpattern so the ripples turn into waves, and they are absolutely right. However, what’s also needed, and a sentiment shared by many community members, is for Textpattern to improve it’s online image at home — the Textpattern website needs a redesign and content audit, badly.

For better or worse, I have been kicking stones around in the Textpattern community again. My motivation being the reading of one too many online CMS comparisons where Textpattern isn’t given due respect; particularly when the comparisons are done by webzines or webmasters-on-the-hunt and the systems compared are fanfare like WordPress, bloathogs (pick one) or local favorites (like Spip) off the rest of the world’s radar. No mention of Textpattern at all.

I had been out of the community loop for quite a while (real life was demanding its due) so I was not up to speed on the community happenings and rather jumped into the fray again without fairly catching up on forum reading. Turns out there was a committee in the works for revamping textpattern.com and taking volunteers to help modernize.

I have always thought highly of the way folks over at WordPress have integrated their various sites (main, wiki, forum…) under a single, holistic presentation Super job, guys! and I expressed this in the Textpattern group looking at the redesign effort. I don’t know if anyone was actively listening, based on initial feedback, but seeing that bases were fairly covered by competant folk in the volunteering effort, I tripped over to my old digs, TextBook, to see if I could approach things from the back door because there’s no reason the tight integration of sites pulled off by WordPress could not be done in a unique way for Textpattern too.

Side: Indeed, what the folks at WordPress have done is a great technique for any community or project where multiple systems (thus multiple interfaces) make up the whole experience. Other examples of this technique are that employed by Paul Gu, JQuery, and I’m sure there are others. If anyone knows of any, I’d be appreciative if you shot me a link where.

Ed. Thanks to maniqui for the additional link.

After a couple back-and-forth forum posts with Patrick Woods (current TextBook manager) and Robert Wetzlmayr (current lead Textpattern developer), I found myself back in position with TextBook, albeit in a non-leadership way (gladly), and happy to try and help bring Textpattern’s web presence up a level by contributing at the TextBook end again.

A Walk Back in TextBook Time

I founded TextBook in 2004 with the great help of other community members (notably Mark Norton), and it was championed by Dean Allen himself who suggested “MediaWiki is the right tool for the job.” The latter likely being why TextBook (besides the clever name, coined by Alicson) became the de facto, “official” Textpattern documentation. Many rogue attempts have been made since to launch some kind of Txp docs replacement, but TextBook has always remained the beacon, and certain parts of it like the Tags Reference, have been exceptionally bright.

I managed TextBook for two years with good intentions and vigor, but intentions and vigor rarely convinced anyone that a wiki was the right system, or to contribute content to it. I initially wanted to write more content myself but my time was consumed with campaigning for—and defending—the wiki more than anything else. I think I lost some street cred in the community for it, but hey, you can’t please everybody. Eventually, repeatedly explaining things wore me down and in 2006 I handed the tiller to Patrick who has skippered TextBook ever since.

For exercise, allow me to revisit some of the most popular arguments from TextBook opponents.

TextBook Opposition

One popular argument against TextBook has been that it’s not powered by the Textpattern engine itself. The statement was always amusing like “the documentation should be powered by the CMS it’s about,” or something similar. This argument comes from folks who don’t really grasp the concept of collaborative writing environments. As much as I like Textpattern, and I really do, it’s not meant to be a collaborative writing system; controlled versioning, sure, but not break-neck collaboration with roll-back abilities. I’ve noticed this argument decreasing since 2004, perhaps a reflection of more people being schooled about the nature, use, and function of wikis since then.

Another frequent argument against the wiki (specifically MediaWiki) was the syntax; that it is too hard, too cumbersome, (whatever) and that it would be better to use a system supporting Textile. I love Textile, but there’s no need for it in MediaWiki because there’s simply no advantage having it once you put your mind to it. If you plan on doing a lot of markup mumbo-jumbo in your documentation, then you’re likely not writing clear documentation. This depends on the wiki project, of course, but for wiki documentation projects for a CMS, all you should need are headers, lists, links and some bold and italic text (images too, of course). MediaWiki syntax is baseline simple for all that. There’s even WYSIWYG buttons to make it simpler – one click – though certainly not needed. Links are even easier to do in MediaWiki than they are using Textile. Admittedly, MediaWiki syntax for tables is a bit abstract, but Textile syntax for tables isn’t much butter, and in any case you shouldn’t need many/any tables for CMS documentation anyway. Of course you can always use regular HTML markup interchangeably, so no harm using standard syntax, it’s even argued over at the Microformats wiki that using standard markup is better practice in a wiki anyway.

A third common argument about TextBook, this one having merit but in need of getting a different kind of response, is that the existing wiki content is not organized or written well. This argument, more than most, always made me laugh and cry at the same time and reflected complete lack of understanding of the point of a wiki; that the wiki user edits the content to make it better, there’s no single person is in charge of doing it. There really seems to be psychological barriers at play here (and exploring this as a research study would be an interesting thing to do).

Rolling Up the Sleeves

Returning to the present, TextBook has changed little in my absence, which is certainly not Patrick’s fault because it changed little in my first two years with it too. No, we can chalk it up to the same old thing as it always is, no author contributions, which means if you’re going to point a finger of blame at someone, you point it at everyone in the community. I even returned to find that many in the community had decided a different wiki system would magically make things better. Truth is, the wiki platform makes no difference. It can be Docuwiki, PBwiki or any other, but if there’s nobody actively making editorial contributions then a wiki will sit quiet and empty and all the Textile in the world won’t change anything. Let me again point out the WordPress Codex uses MediaWiki, as does the Mozilla Dev Wiki, JQuery Wiki, Microformats Wiki and many more respected, elegant and active sites.

What TextBook needs, then, is a focused effort at improving the organization of the wiki information (keeping it flexible enough to expand upon) and giving it a new skin that helps make that organization more intuitive. That should improve general use, but maybe it will encourage more contributions too. The new skin, as I mentioned before, would ideally be a theme consistent across all Textpattern sites, like WordPress has professionally done. In my appreciation for Textpattern and further contributions to it, this will be my position. If it does not go that way by whatever preventative circumstances, then it would be unfortunate, but at least we tried.

  1. Maniquí :: 25 September 08 :: #

    Nice to see you are posting again on Wion, and happy to see you are involved again in the Textpattern community.

    jQuery is another example of a a nice and successfull integration of different systems under the same layout (usually, it just means the same header and footer, and the same styles for the inner content). Their wiki is also published on MediaWiki.

    I hope this is just the first post of an upcoming wave of great articles.

    PS: abracadabra… make a little bigger this textarea!