My Journal

TXP Builders launched

I am very happy to announce the formation of a special venture – TXP Builders. Seeing as I have not posted much of late you may already know about the launch from the Textpattern forum thread or from TXP Tips, but if you are not a regular visitor to those sites let me tell you a little more.

TXP Builders consists of a team of Textpattern friends – web designers and developers – who have come together to work collaboratively on projects. We think that working as a team will speed up development, improve the end product and most importantly: its much more fun to work as a group than alone.

My partners in TXP Builders are: Julián Landerreche, Stef Dawson and Julian Reisenberger – otherwise known as jstubbs, maniquí, Bloke and jakob from the forums.

We will concentrate on Textpattern web development, custom coding, graphic design, illustration, branding and printed material.

The idea was born in September 2009 in part to offer a complete Textpattern development service but also in response to an inability to hire a developer to help me produce a site. Having been frustrated several times with various developers, I thought it was time to do try and solve the problem by teaming up with other developers from a range of disciplines. If you have ever (like me) tried to get pay someone to help develop a site and failed, you’ll know what I mean.

From an email to the first member of the team back on the 17th September 2009:

I can’t believe it is so difficult to get paid work done. I am thinking of creating a new site which offers TXP building services for those who need it.

We’re looking forward to an enjoyable ride – maybe you’d care to come along with us.

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Textpattern upgrade on all sites

Finally managed to update my sites (with the exception of one which is being finalised) to the latest version of Textpattern – 4.2.0.

One of the best features of 4.2.0 is the multi-site support. What this basically means is that you can run many sites off only one installation of TXP, so in the future you only have to upgrade the one install.

To make this site run on multi-sites, I had to change the TXP Minima and TXP Minima Photoblog locations. Previously the templates were run by separate TXP installs, but this was unwieldy and a pain to update. In addition the multi-sites feature does not support the nested sub-domains.

So now the templates are stored in sections of this site which actually makes things much easier. I am motivated to update the templates for 4.2.0, and will do so soon. I’ll also get around to producing a new template or two.

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