Textpattern Support Forum

Thanks for the feedback, Patrick. I hope new users like it too.

I was reading the Textpattern Semantic Model and there’s a point highlighted in yellow about Textile and emphasis and it mentions screen readers knowing what emphasis means. I’d forgotten about that. So it looks like <strong> and <em> should replace <b> and <i> as the norm. <b> and <i> could then be used for additional styling that is the exception. I wonder if there’s a way to search and replace those elements in a whole bunch of pages instead of a page at a time? I think all the tags pages could do with changing in that respect.

I’ve also taken the liberty of making alterations to the Textpattern Semantic Model because I thought some things weren’t clear enough or potentially confusing. I hope I haven’t confused things further!

The <code> element style has gone funny, eg on this page, which I converted to mw format. So please restyle it. BTW, I couldn’t find an alternative mw thing for <code>.

In removing html from this page I put image in frame which allows caption, thereby allowing removal of <br /> and <small>. However, images now float to the right, so css needs altering.

Last edited by zero (2008-06-30 13:19:00)

I have some reservations about the textile extension. I don’t know if it will handle section headers the same way so we lose the automatic TOC’s on the page. Destry might know a bit more.

As I’ve mentioned before (somewhere), I’ve been involved with moving. We (family) are in, but still no internet connection yet so I’ve not been able to keep a presence here as normal. However, you don’t need an internet connection to work locally, so between the multitude of tasks that come with moving into a new house, like stripping all the unsightly wallpaper (wallpaper seemingly as cultural in France as baguettes), I’ve managed to put my TextBook design thoughts to canvas for everyone’s feedback.

A few notes:

1. I’ve gone with a classic Textpattern theme (since I don’t know what the .com guys are cooking up) and tied all the txp family sites into it. I’ve said before that I appreciate the professional way the folks at WordPress have tied all their sites together under one coherent theme so I’ve borrowed from that concept. It’s different enough that nobody should get jumpy. Other sites besides WP have done similar (e.g., Paul Gu, if you consider his Forums), and in anycase it’s a tight way to bring different interfaces (site, blog, forum, wiki…) together that no versed UX designer would argue against.
2. The mockups represent a typical interior content page (as opposed to the home/index page), and reflect a logged-in and logged-out state. The only difference being the appearance of the “edit” links and the state of the logged-in user tools in top right.
3. I have not yet really given thought to the left column main topics; what you see there is really just placeholder, for what can simply be added later. Likewise the content of this page is arbitrary.
4. The “Related Reading” list is an example of using a MW template to create a mini-navigation list for a given suite of pages. For example, let’s say you had “Five Steps to a Devastatingly Gorgious Textpattern Site,” and each step was a page devoted to itself. You could use the mini-nav list template in each of the five pages, providing a link for each page, so no matter which page you were on, it would be dead-easy and intuitive to jump from one page to another without the seagull-feeding pattern (fly up to top and dive back down) of browsing that is often typical of wikis. This mini-nav would always have the same position and presentation, authors would simply add the different links as needed for their mini-nav needs. Note this is not the same as the page “Contents” which is a mini-index of the current page.
5. The images don’t show it, but the backgrounds of the header and footer will span the entire width of the screen, while the body is centered and has left and right margins. The total body width is pixels, while the contained divisions (three columns) are percentages. The min screen size targeted will be 1024, which should be acceptable in this community (and most of the web these days). A good print sheet will be created too, but nothing for mobile at this point (though anyone is welcome to give that a shot).
6. What I foresee as being under the “Resources” link in the main menu is perhaps a wiki page location (e.g., Community Portal) that provides a list of profiles (Title, one paragraph description, site link) of all the Txp-related sites and resources having active standing, whether from TeamTextpattern or Joe Individual. (Personal blogs not included).
7. These mockups are image files created on a winblows laptop that does not render fonts very well, so disregard the pixelly-looking fonts. For the most part what you are looking at is arial and verdana.

And finally the mocks:

• Logged out
• Logged in

I’ll start work on this in a local wiki (cuz I’ll probably use a variation of this locally regardless of what happens here), and roll into the dev wiki when I have internet connection again.

————-

Side:

The question that begs to be asked (assuming a common theme is used across sites) is who’s going to reskin the forum? :)
It should be easy to see how the forum could slip right into a theme I’m proposing without problems. Maybe I’ll do a mockup of that too just for fun; might have the following three mods, at least:

1. Drop the “Txp Networks” dropdown since all those links will be accounted for already in one way or another.
2. Drop the left and right columns to gain that main content area space for forum tables.
3. [optional] Why not keep just the right column and put the “Jump to…” and “Search” controls at the top of it, and then run the names of logged-in users in a vertical list underneath that (as opposed to the typical, horizontal list at bottom).

EDIT: Orthography fixes.

Last edited by Destry (2008-08-18 14:51:57)

Bloke wrote:

…it manages to be both classic Textpattern and contemporary at the same time.

Thanks, Bloke. “Sweeeeet“er words could not have been said about it.