The two-way street
Recently I’ve heard from a couple of people that they’re frustrated by the lack of various features (usually minor things, small conveniences). It’s frustrating, they say, having to hack the source each time they update. A couple say they are considering switching from Textpattern to something else as a result.
The reason Textpattern doesn’t include your pet feature is simple: you haven’t sent us a patch.
Textpattern is an open source project. That means it relies on code contributions from the community. Textpattern is built by people just like you, who contribute code and features they’ve written for their own projects or personal sites.
If you’re skilled enough to hack the source, you’re capable of sending a patch (it’s a one liner command: svn diff > my.patch, or diff -uNr original mycopy > my.patch).
It’s a win-win situation: if we include your feature in the core, you won’t have to worry about making changes each upgrade; other developers won’t waste their time doing something that’s already been done; and the whole community benefits from the new feature.
Not every patch goes into the core, but anything that’s simple and low impact has a good chance. Often, the patches we reject wind up inspiring a similar feature later on. So, please: send us your patches. We won’t bite. Perhaps it won’t be included – but your chances are good, far higher than if you sit around waiting for someone else to do it for you.
The best way to get patches to the dev team, and discuss possible new features, is to subscribe to the txp-dev mailing list.
