TextThing is in Beta

Published 9 January 06 by Justin French, 11 comments

That, my friends, is a screen shot of justinfrench.com, which may not look like much, but it represents a whole lot of work over the Christmas “break” getting TextThing to the point where it could replace Textpattern as my CMS any day now. Yes, that’s justinfrench.com running under TextThing on my Powerbook.

I’m really happy with how things are shaping up. It’s staying pretty true to my original concept (although somewhat bent to the “Rails way” of doing things) – there’s a web interface to add content, presentation is done through real RHTML and CSS files rather than through the interface, articles and links can all be tagged, the “new article” UI is damn fine, and it really feels like home.

But it’s not all good news. Of all the features I really wanted in TextThing, the /section/category/title or /section/sub-section/title URL structure has had to go. It added a level of complexity to this early version that I just didn’t want to deal with. I still think we’ll get it in there one day, but it won’t be in 1.0.

However, I’m embracing the constraint, and there’s still a whole heap of URLs to choose from.

The most interesting shift for me was ditching the concept of Textpattern’s categories, replacing it with tags. So, to pull up that lists of “Recommended”, “Listen” and “Related” links in the right column, I’m just tagging them all with the right word.

There’s still a whole lot to do before I unleash a public beta, but we have definite progress here. If you see this website drop out for a few days, I’ll be hooking it up!