Thursday 19 January 2006 by
Besides Rights&Permissions, is there any tools or features you thought or wandered about, but did not start coding because you had no time to think them through, imagine how the admin or layout would be, etc.? To see if we can expand the Rights&Permissions experiment unto other areas.
The Rights and Permissions Worgroup, for those who are not following the forum closely, is a self-organizing group of textpattern enthusiasts that got together to work out the challenge of giving Textpattern a better permission system.
It was formed in response to the Assignment: section permission desin. We have posted several such assignments for users/enthusiasts and welcome input on those issues. You can find more by searching for assignment in the Feature Request forums.
How people organize their contributions is entirely up to them. Work-groups can incur quite a bit of overhead with respect to managing communications and then aggregating all discussions into some form of “result” that we can work with. In some cases it may well be worth the effort, in other cases it might be much easier to spend the available time on the problem. Usually smaller increments are better for the people working on them, and for us to be able to incoorporate those ideas. The more complex the topics and results, the costlier it is for everyone involved, and the more people may be disappointed when we can’t dedicate the necessary time for it, because of other priorities. (On a related note, we just added a new FAQ item Will you add my code to Textpattern?)
Personally I feel that the Textbook wiki is a very good place for people to cooperate in drafting out ideas and features. Destry wrote about it on the forum. A few feature requests have been seeded, if you want to join in, it’s very easy to request a new account. The advantage of a wiki-page is that (if used properly) it always displays the latest results of the combined effort, wheras in a forum-thread the focus is more strongly on whatever happened to be said last. (Also see Document Mode vs. Thread-Mode.)
A few more words on the Rights and Permissions workgroup
I’ve skimmed some posts in the thread, and I have to appreciate the amount of time people are willing to spend in drafting things out and debating ideas. It’s great to see this interest combined with a huge dose of dilligence. Independent of what may finally come off from this effort, I have to say: Thank you very much to the people involved! (If I am reading the first post right it’s Matthew, Alexandra, Jeremie, Saccade, P and Neutrino. I hope I didn’t forget anyone!) The tidbits I looked at looked fairly complex, maybe even too much for Textpattern, but as I understand it, the whole terrain is first being explored, to be able to make better informed decisions and to finally settle on something which fits with the overall aims and goals of textpattern. I am looking forward to the results. :)
Sencer,
Glad to know its appreciated. Its been a good experience for me. As you said, its getting complicated, and perhaps too complicated to be dealt with in textpattern, but hopefully we are thuroughly exhausting all the needs people have expressed. I hope we find a working solution. A special thanks ought to go out to Alexandra who started the idea and has had many strong ideas, and to Saccade who has done an incredible amount of work since the onset.
Like the dev. team, I want to use textpattern for my own reasons, and this seems to be a good way to move toward helping textpattern mature into a stronger CMS.
Thanks again for the encouragement Sencer,
Matthew
20 Jan 06
matthew Smith
Sencer,
thank you too for the encouragement! Hope to find a solution that is easy and powerful and can be implemented conveniently.
And it is a pleasure in itself having those splendid companions in the workgroup!
not to forget: thank you for textpattern!
20 Jan 06
Michael Schlierbach
I think my only request wouldn’t be a feature, but a way to control comment formatting, between “classic” and post-4.0.2, where people can use H1, etc. to mess up formatting.
Actually, I just thought of something. I’d love to be able to page through a list of articles, say maybe 10 to a page, and then have the next 10 on another, etc. I’m out of ideas for how to do that on: godbit.com/featured.
23 Jan 06
Nathan Smith