Comments on: Middle-end your CMS

By: Dan Tocchini

Dan Tocchini — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 10:36:45 +0000

Man, I’ve been pondering this same exact WordPress – Node.js setup… Thanks for the confirmation that I’m not crazy!

I wish Heroku would hurry up and open up Node.js hosting…

By: JuliÃ¡n Landerreche

JuliÃ¡n Landerreche — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 21:51:05 +0000

You are welcome.
Funny that you never heard of TXP before. It’s a well kept secret amongst frond-end developers
But there were and still are some really good talented coders in core dev team (in fact, Automattic kidnapped Alex Shiels from TXP code dev team).

Trying to avoid hijacking the main topic of this article and comments thread, let me add that if for some reason you are curious and feel tempted to play with Textpattern, please, feel free to contact me if there is anything I could do to help you make it easier to grasp its concepts and climb its not-so-stepped learning curve, and get directly on some hardcore TXP coding.
Would love to see some middle-end concepts applied over a proxy-Node.js-Apache-TXP-powered website
Yeah, a fanboy encountered you, deal with it. But the community is lovely too.

By: getify

getify — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 21:17:48 +0000

Thanks for your comment. I’ve honestly never heard of TXP before, but I’ll certainly take a look. I don’t necesarily love WordPress, but it’s been pretty good for my needs thus far. I’m definitely not a hard-core blogger like some people are.

I know I talked mostly about WordPress in this post, but I believe the ideas and approach I’ve presented are really true for most CMS’s and blog engines. My hope is that people will see this as the pattern/approach, regardless of which particular implementation they may currently have running.

By: JuliÃ¡n Landerreche

JuliÃ¡n Landerreche — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 20:37:13 +0000

Hi getify.
Being reading your articles about the middle-end layer, and they present a very interesting concept that already exists in both the code and our minds, but that it’s very difficult to identify and manage separately (from front and back-end stuff), as you clearly state.

I like your pattern/conceptual approach to this topics, instead of giving a packaged solution that only leads to bring people asking “I’ve drop the file in my server and it just doesn’t work, help me, please, it’s broken, fix it”.
Although it would be also cool to see some of that server-side JS (Node.js based?) you mentioned but refuse to show. I know, I know, you probably don’t want to get people too excited

Well, I’m more of a front-ender, but I can also hack my way into back-end/server-side basic stuff for creating websites that, as you said, “sit somewhere between a full web application and a basic content web site.”.

I know we are talking about conceptual patterns, intangible code here, and I may go off on a tangent here, but I wonder why such a clever developer like you is using that WP-thing, being that in this world, there exists something called TXP, which surpass the hyped WP-thing by much, imho.

You know (alert: conspiracy theory ahead), TXP, the thing that would have just made WP run away into the shadows if it wasn’t for some secret agreement between Dean Allen and Matt Mullenweg. Thankfully Matt gave some credit to Dean and TXP in the About section of WP.org, “for ideas and inspiration”.

Sorry, I’ve finally gone off the tangent.
What I wanted to say is that a middle-end approach seems something very doable in TXP, being that it is, in its front-end output, just a blank canvas, and its tags (TXP superiority: its tags, its tag parser, its tags-in-tags parser’s superpowers, and its plugins) are very flexible on terms of the markup they can generate.
I’ll experimenting whenever I find the time with this middle-end concepts.

Thanks.