Monday August 15, 2005

Textpattern 4.0 Up and Running.

I wish I could say that my switch to the first “stable” release of Textpattern was seamless and glitch-free. It wasn’t.

In the Beginning…

Upon upgrading and logging into the Admin panel to run the update script, I was greeted with a cascade of PHP errors. Actually, it was one error repeated ad nauseum. It took me a minute to figure out how to clear it from my screen (it was a language setting issue), but a novice user would have probably quit right there. Maybe it was an issue with upgrading, and not entirely TXP’s fault. Maybe I wouldn’t have had the problem if I had been keeping up with the release candidates, but I wasn’t. I came straight from 1.0rc1.

My date format was all jacked up as well (oh yeah, the technical jargon is straight flowin’ today!). I had to fumble around until I found a setting under Admin/Site Preferences that move the site from a “Test” to “Production” environment. Then dates worked fine. Undocumented procedures have been Textpattern’s Achilles Heel, and I had hoped for concise upgrade instructions. Alas, there is still quite a bit of the ol’ DIY ethic present in TXP.

I had to update a couple of my plugins, but once I’d done that everything fell into place rather nicely. That is to say, nothing exploded. My site didn’t die.

Still Some Roaches at this Party

I’m still working out some of the bugs (oh, yes, there are bugs) and figuring out how to re-hack some of my favorite mods into the site. There seem to be some CSS problems in the Admin panel but I can tidy that up on my own now, can’t I? My advice: if you feel confident working out issues with Textpattern, upgrade away! If you’re a novice user, wait. There are bugs to work out first.

Short list of things to do:

  1. Restore comment invites to top of comment stack (Big bug) sorta fixed… I’ll let it slide for now. 8/16/05
  2. Get alternating rows in comments working again (I’m looking at you, Mr. Hicks) FIXED 8/16/05
  3. Get Admin panel CSS ship-shape
  4. Restore or re-edit my eng-gb.txt file FIXED 8/16/05
  5. Get error pages back up and working
  6. Remove comment number from feeds FIXED 8/16/05
  7. Restore full article to feed FIXED 8/16/05

If you notice anything else out of place, let me know. But just so you know, the pink color that is all over these pages is actually supposed to be there. ;)

The Love Story Continues

So is Textpattern worth it? Uh huh! Despite the small headaches, it’s still the easiest CMS I’ve had the pleasure of working with. While the upgrade was a bit rough, perhaps the clean install is still as smooth as butter. At any rate, documentation and process cleanup can only get better, right?

You’re a little tenacious, Textpattern, but I still love you.

Comments


Sam » 5052 days ago #

There is a nice plugin that does the alternating rows for comments. No need to wait for Jon!

That version works fine with 4.0 too, although the author could do with updating it.

As with yourself, the upgrade wasn’t seemless, but it was quite a big upgrade none-the-less and was well worth the 10minutes it took to return chaos back to order.

mat » 5052 days ago #

As Sam mentioned, that plugin should sort you out for #2. You should also pick up the plugin for styling your own comments. It’s available from the same author.

Now that you’re using the same version as I am, I’ve noticed that your RSS feed for ‘Plugged In’ is broken. I still can’t get clean urls to work for multiple feeds so if you stumble across a solution during your updating, I would appreciate to hear how you resolved it.

Personally, everything went smoothly for the update apart from a couple of hacks which I had implemented. Thankfully I had these backed up.

Jared Christensen » 5052 days ago #

Thanks, Sam. I’ll check out that plugin.

Mat – The TXP gurus are claiming that feeds are now working the way they always should have, that is, NOT as clean feeds: Response @ TXP Forums. Evidently, there is no fix for this.

Michael Heilemann » 5052 days ago #

I’m getting [#] where # is the number of comments, added to entry headlines in your RSS feed. This makes it update every time someone leaves a comment, and it is really annoying :(

Matthew Pennell » 5052 days ago #

Aargh, stupid tabindex problem in the comment form is still there then… grrr

The ‘comment number in RSS feed’ has always been a problem – you have to change a setting in admin_config.php to get rid of it.

Pierce » 5052 days ago #

I’m still working on rc1 too. I’ve hacked away at the code over the last six months or so, I can’t even remember most of the changes I’ve made. Upgrading is a terrifying prospect. I think I’ll wait till I have a few spare hours/days to fix any potential problems.

Jared Christensen » 5052 days ago #

Michael – Thanks for the heads up. It’s on my “urgent” list of items to fix…

Nathan Smith » 5051 days ago #

I’m still running TXP rc1, and will be switching to 4.0 soon. I’m also moving from 1and1 to Dreamhost, so if anyone has experience importing SQL databases, give me a hollar. I agree, Textpattern is a bit quirky, but I love it. :)

Thomas Stache » 5046 days ago #

Forget about admin_config.php, all these (feed) settings are now in the interface at Prefs->Advanced Prefs.

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