Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

sarah · 2009-09-29 00:20:34

1. Textpattern, without a doubt, is one of hte most secure open source CMS’s out there. It clearly is a very very well written CMS.

2. Textpatten has a long history and is cited often as being the most trustworthy.

However,

3. Textpattern’s UI is rather….dated and fiddly. Heck, even the forum layout leaves a lot to be desired.

4. Textpattern has yet to produce an indepth tutorial example on how to create a single page website, which is the most effective way for a person to develop their undestanding on how textpattern works. The English video tutorials by textpattern users on youtube also suck, and are rather innacurate in some aspects.

jsoo · 2009-09-29 00:55:51

sarah wrote:

Textpattern has yet to produce an indepth tutorial example on how to create a single page website, which is the most effective way for a person to develop their undestanding on how textpattern works.

It’s an interesting comment, because it is clearly the most effective way for you to start down that road, and you have helped us indentify a clear need in the docs. It might well be that this is a minority preference; on the other hand it might be that the Txp community has self-selected to users who prefer to start with theory before wading in to tags, and hence all the tutorials get written that way. Effective teaching has to cater to different learning styles. I would characterize this one as the “Hello, World!” approach — get something, anything, happening as soon as possible to give the learner a feeling of control and familiarity.

Somewhat tangentially, even before this thread came up I was musing about available tutorials, tips, and so on (here and here, for instance), and about taking a stab at something broader in scope than isolated “tips”. Just posted what I see as the first installment in a projected series with a focus on basics. This first piece certainly isn’t advocacy, nor is it a tutorial, more of an opinionated overview. “Long Winded” are my middle names, so it’s none too concise. I don’t see this one as fitting in to TextBook so will leave it on my personal site for now.

Some high-quality screencasts would be very helpful too. I have this vague idea of trying some when I finally get around to upgrading my laptop to something that will run OS X.6, which apparently has built-in support for this.

Bloke · 2009-09-29 01:15:08

sarah wrote:

Textpattern’s UI is rather….dated and fiddly.

One person’s whizz-bang-swish is another person’s annoyance; and vice versa. The good news is that the admin themes ~~http://textgarden.org/layouts/?c=txp-admin~~ can help. Most of the ones available at the moment are simple colour scheme changes but a few of them go further — and there’s plenty more to come as people get more adventurous with the system, which has only been available for about a month so far.

Textpattern has yet to produce an indepth tutorial example on how to create a single page website

True, for all the reasons jsoo mentions and more. To be fair, the CMSms one you cited is hardly in-depth ;-) As a non-user of CMSms, the line-item “Assign a template to the new page” would have me scratching my head as I wouldn’t know how to make the template do what I wanted. But we do have the Textbook wiki, so if anyone writes one that’s useful to the community it’ll end up there. And as jsoo points out, that may happen now we know there’s a need for one.

The English video tutorials by textpattern users on youtube also suck, and are rather innacurate in some aspects

I didn’t even know there were any! Just had a look and there are only two from this year and they cover simple tasks like managing articles. So if you want a one-stop start-to-finish create-one-page-in-TXP tutorial you’re out of luck at the moment.

For the record I have yet to find an engaging video tutorial on any subject, let alone CMSs. It seems that every tutorial I’ve ever sat through — be it for Photoshop, Lightwave, Wordpress, Dreamweaver, whatever — have all been created by people with a penchant for the soporific ;-)

EDIT: of course, the problem with a screencast or video tutorial on YouTube is that once it’s published it’s there for eternity, as to update it you have to delete it and upload a new one when a new version comes out, losing all the comments/view stats, etc. So unless there’s a steady stream of video tutorial writers for any platform, content is always going to get stale. Must be a real bugbear for WP videographers as there’s a new version out every 8 minutes :-p

EDIT2: nice write-up, jsoo. Very smart.

Last edited by Bloke (2009-09-29 01:21:06)

JanDW · 2009-09-29 01:55:32

Sarah, this article on how to create a simple portfolio/blog with txp might help you It gives concrete code samples as well as a word of explanation.

Also, you can select a different forum theme under profile then display – I think David DeSandro’s “tabula” is much better. I customized them a little myself using greasemonkey and the files he provides here

See? All your problems are getting washed away like when you’re showering away little bits of skin from other people after a long transatlantic flight. What has Modx ever done for you?

I think Jeff and Stef (not to be confused with Jef and Steff) gave some clear and concise info in this thread too though.

Last edited by JanDW (2009-09-29 01:56:09)

masa · 2009-09-29 01:58:34

Sarah, it might help, if you could tell us, how you used to create websites before.
For instance did you hand-code in a text editor or use a visual editor such as Dreamweaver?

True, there isn’t a tutorial on how to create a one-page site.
However it sort of comes included with the basic installation: I was able to pick it up by dissecting the default page template and referring to the FAQ

3. Textpattern’s UI is rather….dated and fiddly.

Opinions on this seem to differ. I find it refreshingly simplistic and straight forward.
Any specific gripes?

hcgtv · 2009-09-29 03:16:14

sarah wrote:

3. Textpattern’s UI is rather….dated and fiddly. Heck, even the forum layout leaves a lot to be desired.

That’s why Sarah moved on, it wasn’t the tutorials or lack there of, it’s how nice the MODx experience is.

MODx runs a rather nicely designed SMF forum, heck I’m even tempted to sign on just to play around with it. This forum is indeed dated, the search leaves a lot to be desired and at present there is no upgrade path. I’ve championed PunBB for many years, but even I have to admit that at this point, it’s better to move on, than to continue maintaining a heavily modded forum.

The use of Textile, where every forum uses BBCode, has never really made much sense to me. I use Textpattern daily, but I never have to enter code snippets in my articles, where here, it happens quite often. The most I do in my articles is link to an external site, make something bold or italic, and include an image, but the interface does this for me. So I come here and often times I have to open up a tab to textile.thresholdstate.com, just to make a post. Then I go to another forum and end up entering textile where I should be entering bbcode, I curse a bit, then have to edit the post. So does Textile save me time, no, it actually slows me down.

The design of the home page is coming soon, but it’s not going to make much of an impact on the user experience if linking from the home page takes them to another property that looks antiquated. What MODx has, as do the more popular projects on the web, is a cohesive look and feel.

I love my Debian, because I’ve had many good years with it, but Ubuntu sure looks good ;)

jstubbs · 2009-09-29 06:11:56

Reading through the forum post by Sarah re beginner tutorials, I see a need for this to be addressed. I see Jeff has written on this already. (Jeff – can we post this on TXP Tips?)

We need to write a tutorial for single page installs for beginners. I can do this (if Jeff’s is not enough), and further, I will create a new TXP Minima template that uses no forms at all, which is a good way to start – copy/paste a page template.

I agree on the forum – the search sucks and the look is dated.

tennapel · 2009-09-29 07:18:27

I have been looking at CMS-es for a long time, trying out several but never have been able to find one that served my needs. Untill I was asked to upgrade a website and the complexity of the site required the use of a CMS.

I fiddled with different solutions and Textpattern was absolutely the most difficult one to understand. The layout of the Textbook pages is the main problem, the organisation of the page is somehow illogical, I can understand Sarah’s complaint very well.
If there should be an effort, I think it would be reorganising Textbook and reorganising the layout of the different textpattern related sites, it is a bit confusing. Somehow it belongs together but not quite. I think the quality of the content of most articles is good enough.

The only reason I did dive into Textpattern was that in a few simple setups I tested out to make a proof of concept of what was in my head, most of the other CMS-es did fail.

I bought the book in the end and that clarified a lot! To be honest, I think you need the steps of explanation in the book to be able to grasp Textpattern.

I can understand the appeal of Modx like solutions, but I pray that is NOT the way Textpattern will ever go. The learning curve is steep just because it’s simplicity gives you an enormous flexibility and the flip side of flexibility is complexity.

Last edited by tennapel (2009-09-29 07:28:25)

Bloke · 2009-09-29 08:38:31

tennapel wrote:

The layout of the Textbook pages is the main problem, the organisation of the page is somehow illogical

Work is ongoing to make Textbook more logical. Els has done some great stuff behind the scenes lately and jsoo and Uli have been putting plenty of hours in. Plus of course Destry showed us all the light switch and how to do stuff right.

Sadly there’s still a lot of old content floating around. A lot of the admin side documentation needs to be brought up to 4.2.0. I’ve been off the boil on Textbook of late but as I stumble across outdated content I mark it as such and see if it can be moved elsewhere / updated / consolidated / deleted. You could help too.

If there should be an effort, I think it would be reorganising Textbook and reorganising the layout of the different textpattern related sites

When the relaunch of textpattern.com takes place, the other sites will follow behind with a more consistent look. I believe Textgarden and Textbook are planned; textpattern.org needs a big make-over imho but I don’t know who has a login there. The sticking point is always this forum. It’s heavily modded so it’s tricky to update or replace and this kind of thing is out of my league. Needs a good champion. Know anyone?

tennapel · 2009-09-29 09:06:00

Bloke wrote:

tennapel wrote:
The layout of the Textbook pages is the main problem, the organisation of the page is somehow illogical
Work is ongoing to make Textbook more logical. Els has done some great stuff behind the scenes lately and jsoo and Uli have been putting plenty of hours in. Plus of course Destry showed us all the light switch and how to do stuff right.

That is good news.

Last edited by tennapel (2009-09-29 09:06:44)

jsoo · 2009-09-29 09:52:58

jstubbs wrote:

Reading through the forum post by Sarah re beginner tutorials, I see a need for this to be addressed. I see Jeff has written on this already. (Jeff – can we post this on TXP Tips?)

If you mean my four-step sequence for overwriting the default template, I don’t see that as ready to be posted as a Tip. I am giving some thought to a more complete walk-through along these lines.

ndrwtrvrs · 2009-09-29 10:18:24

Hi Sarah,

Just to share my own experience, I like others initially found the model that Textpattern uses a little hard to get my head around and the thing that really caused the lightbulb moment for me was reading ‘Textpattern Solutions: PHP-based content management made easy’ by Kevin Potts et al.

You can see a preview of the book on Google Books here: http://books.google.com/books?id=Z4n709JIOL0C
…but, I’d strongly recommend buying it – it’s a really easy read, it takes you from just about exactly where it sounds like you are to where you need to be.

Marie Poulin’s tutorial linked to by JanDW is a really good starting place too.

Good luck with MODx, it’s a good alternative, but hope you get the chance to give Textpattern another go – you won’t regret it.

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#25 2009-09-29 00:20:34

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#26 2009-09-29 00:55:51

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#27 2009-09-29 01:15:08

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#28 2009-09-29 01:55:32

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#29 2009-09-29 01:58:34

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#30 2009-09-29 03:16:14

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#31 2009-09-29 06:11:56

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#32 2009-09-29 07:18:27

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#33 2009-09-29 08:38:31

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#34 2009-09-29 09:06:00

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#35 2009-09-29 09:52:58

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#36 2009-09-29 10:18:24

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

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