Archives

ubernostrum · 2005-10-18 15:18:02

aesop1 wrote:
> It is sort of like when I walk outside without my trousers and explain to the neighbors
> that my lack of clothing was merely an an oversight on my part. I will tell them instead that
> wearing pants simply wasn’t a priority. ;)

Not quite. It’s as if I went out without a bow tie, and everyone pounced on me for not wearing one. I don’t personally have a need for a bow tie, I don’t personally like bow ties and I don’t feel a bow tie would accent my outfit in any useful way. But people are coming up to me all the time saying “I can’t believe you’d go out in public without a bow tie!”

In other words, what Mary said; this is a feature request, and one of the important things is to talk about how many people want or need the feature, and how many of them want or need it to be implemented as a core function of TXP. To some people, not having a date-based archive may well be like going outside without pants (do kilts count?), but to others it’s not as important.

This also gets back to my earlier point about date-based navigation being very popular with weblogs, but not so much with other types of sites. Is that use significant enough in TXP’s user base to justify implementation, and can it be implemented in such a way as not to interfere with other uses? Those are the kinds of questions that aren’t being answered in this debate. At least, not so far.

Sencer · 2005-10-18 16:05:23

It is sort of like when I walk outside without my trousers and explain to the neighbors that my lack of clothing was merely an an oversight on my part. Now I think I will tell them instead that wearing pants simply wasn’t a priority. ;)

maybe funny, but misses the point. The dictionary defines:
o·ver·sight -> An unintentional omission or mistake.
pri·or·i·tize -> To arrange or deal with in order of importance.

There’s a million features that make sense in one or the other situation and which would make some users happy, yet it’s likely that Textpattern will never have a million features.
Adding features is not about us executing power and checking/unchecking items on a checklist to our likings, just because we can. It’s about doing a ton of stuff with scarce resources. (It’s also about many other things as well.)

The point that seems to be missed is, that we are not against date-based archives “on principal”, it’s just that I (and probably the other devs) have other items on their to-do lists that are deemed more important by us. And arguing about it (while I have nothing against it) is unlikely to change the situation.

What continues to puzzle me, however, is that we are SO CLOSE to having a modicum of date-based archive support with TXP AS IT IS NOW in the release version—would it be that hard to add PAGING SUPPORT?

adding paging support for TXP’s existing month var IS JUST COMPLETING UNFINISHED WORK.

I call this the “wedge-approach”. Once we have a “modicum of date-based archive support”, any and every bell and whistle added to it will just become “COMPLETING UNFINISHED WORK”. ;) (btw: WHAT’S WITH ALL THE SHOUTING???!!!!11!!!1)
I am guessing that the month-filter you see in that article-tag was added due to the same line of reasoning you are employing now: “If we just do this tiny change, everybody interested in date-based archives will be happy and nobody will ever complain or argue about date-based archives again (or at least I won’t). Just this change!” Looks like it didn’t quite work out. ;)

Seriously though: I don’t mind it, if you are having fun arguing, but there are many different ways to be helpful that i would much rather see people participating in.

aesop1 · 2005-10-18 16:18:00

Oookay, again: date-based support is already there in the release version of TXP. It isn’t like we are asking for the addition of a major feature. We just need paging added. I’ve already suggested a simple fix in the dev lists—haven’t heard back one way or another.

I would disagree with your last point, ubernostrum: I see date-based navigation as being very important for sites other than weblogs (but again, not as the sole source of navigation). In fact, I have never implemented a date-based archive for a weblog, but I have for commercial or organizational sites: usually to filter long lists of press releases.

Last edited by aesop1 (2008-01-24 15:57:34)

michaelkpate · 2005-10-18 16:53:54

> Sencer wrote:

> The point that seems to be missed is, that we are not against date-based archives “on principal”, it’s just that I (and probably the other devs) have other items on their to-do lists that are deemed more important by us. And arguing about it (while I have nothing against it) is unlikely to change the situation.

Not to beat an already quite-dead horse, but many of us got involved in weblogging based on the model set forth by Dave Winer. While it could be argued that he takes date-based archives to an extreme, nonetheless it has been sort of expected within the blogging community that software would include the capability. While there is certainly value to be had in categories and tags and all sorts of taxonomies, being to able to refer to a specific date (example) can be valuable as well.

Getting back on topic: part of the problem in the past has been figuring out what to wait on the developers to get around to, what to work up a patch for, and what to write a plugin for. In this case, for instance, if someone were to develop a patch to add the capability in today, would it have a chance of getting incorporated? Or is it just better to focus exclusively on the plug-in route?

aesop1 · 2005-10-18 17:29:29

Thanks Michael, I appreciate your sober comments.

That isn’t to say that one couldn’t improve on the basic date-based archive feature that is already in TXP. If you or anyone else is willing to take the project on as a plugin (or revive rss_suparchive), I applaud the effort.

I think you hit on something: Maybe part of the disconnect here is that some here are thinking of date-based archives a la Winer, others — like myself — are thinking of different contexts for selecting a specific date or date range.

Matt

Last edited by aesop1 (2005-10-18 17:38:14)

aesop1 · 2005-10-18 18:25:22

Sencer: Sorry, I just read your post out of sequence.

I will cease my uppercase emphasis — which I just interpret as just that: emphasis, not rage — but I will fall in line with convention. Hopefully the context and contents of my posts, rather than the styling, is conveying that I really just want to be helpful.

I am puzzled — legitimately puzzled — not for the sake of argument when you say:

“I am guessing that the month-filter you see in that article-tag was added due to the same line of reasoning you are employing now: “If we just do this tiny change, everybody interested in date-based archives will be happy and nobody will ever complain or argue about date-based archives again (or at least I won’t). Just this change!” Looks like it didn’t quite work out. ;)”

For some of us I think it does work out, it is just doesn’t page properly. Alesh (the one who started this thread), for example, seems satisfied with the month filter approach, he would just like to page those results.

If you’re saying that the paging thing is just too much right now — that it might interfere with some other aspect of the code or whatever, then I appreciate that (although it might be nice to have an explanation as to why it won’t work). But the responses here have been tied up with other arguments, so it isn’t too surprising that we feel inclined to fend off criticisms suggesting that we are simply using poor GUI design or that maybe we should just be using another tool altogether.

I am happy to move to another — more helpful — venue for this discussion, but I really thought we were asking for something simple and the “feature requests” forum doesn’t seem terribly inappropriate for that.

Last edited by aesop1 (2008-01-24 16:01:48)

Sencer · 2005-10-18 20:03:57

For some of us I think it does work out, it is just doesn’t page properly. Alesh (the one who started this thread), for example, seems satisfied with the month filter approach, he would just like to page those results.

alesh himself showed how to work around that. And even if you wanted it to work just like you wish, it can be done in a 3-line plugin. There wouldn’t be the need for lengthy posts about it here.

If you’re saying that the paging thing is just too much right now

No, I’m saying I haven’t looked at the suggestions/patches and their consequences, because I have been busy with things that have to get done (remember, priorities), things that actually should have gotten done before the 4.0.0 release. I’m not going to take time off of that for things relating to low priority stuff that is not essential and can be worked around easily.

But the responses here have been tied up with other arguments, so it isn’t too surprising that we feel inclined to fend off criticisms suggesting that we are simply using poor GUI design or that maybe we should just be using another tool altogether.

The responses here are for the discussion of “date-based archives”. As such they are in the appropiate place. It sometimes helps if we get more opinions from different people. It rarely helps when people repeat themselves/ their assertions about the “essential nature” of a feature.
If you want to discuss patches or send reminders, the dev-list is probably more appropiate, maybe it would have been better to keep the two issues completely seperate…

Getting back on topic: part of the problem in the past has been figuring out what to wait on the developers to get around to, what to work up a patch for, and what to write a plugin for. In this case, for instance, if someone were to develop a patch to add the capability in today, would it have a chance of getting incorporated? Or is it just better to focus exclusively on the plug-in route?

I feel you. Unfortunately I don’t a clear cut solution, especially if the plugin does not exist yet (catch-22, i know). Though I will say this: 4.0.x has the focus on not breaking compat. for updaters, as such I think the tendency is to rather not add larger new stuff.
Rob asked a similar question on the txp-dev list a few weeks back and offered up to write a patch (for multi-category support), to which Alex wrote a bit more detailed answer, which you also might want to look at.
If I was you, I’d probably be more inclined to look at a plugin-solution.

aesop1 · 2005-10-18 21:49:07

Thanks, Sencer. That was helpful. Plugin time it is.

One comment though: I am not sure that Alesh’s workaround (limit=“99“) is a satisfactory one, but if he is happy with it, more power to him. For myself, I’ll shut up, buck up and get to work on that three-line plugin.

Thanks for your patience in slogging through this with us.

Regards,

Matt

aesop1 · 2005-10-19 18:41:06

Okay, for anyone that might benefit from this:

http://www.webinetics.com/txp/mrh_date_archive.txt

At this point this plugin does nothing other than provide a replacement option for TXP’s older (<code><txp:mrh_older></code>) and newer (<code><txp:mrh_newer></code>) tags, providing support for paging lists with date filtered (example: ?month=2004-09) results. Consider it a bandaid until something better comes along—like an update of Rob Sable’s excellent rss_suparchive plugin. If that doesn’t happen soon, I may create some menu generation code to enhance this plugin.

Yeah, I know, I should post to plugins forum, but I thought I would see if anyone (Alesh?) benefits from this first.

Last edited by aesop1 (2005-10-19 18:45:03)

alesh · 2005-11-06 23:12:34

OK… i finally installed aesop’s plugin (into 4.0.2, natch), and it works like a charm. At this point I’m still befuddled at how much controversy this issue’s evoked, but i’m satisfied.

an interesting observation that came from this, though:

http://www.criticalmiami.com/?month=2005-08 calls a page with the (16) most recent articles from August.
http://www.criticalmiami.com/?s=archive calls a page with the 99 most recent articles overall (that’s a big page, so not a link).

therefore, shouldn’t http://www.criticalmiami.com/?month=2005-08&s=archive or http://www.criticalmiami.com/?s=archive&month=2005-08 call the “first 99” (ie all) articles from August?

In fact, the date spec gets ignored in both instances. Something I did wrong?

Last edited by alesh (2005-11-06 23:14:24)

aesop1 · 2005-11-07 17:06:10

That’s interesting, Alesh. One thing to consider is the limit set by your article tag — which I assume you’re saying is currently set to “limit=99”.

Also, make sure you are using txp:article, not txp:article_custom, for your date-based archive since only the txp:article tag is context aware in terms of the URL.

If you are doing that, then I am puzzled. I have tested this on my end and it works (section included), but I am using clean URLs which appear like so: http://www.sitename.com/section/?month=2005-08 (no, the query string part isn’t “clean,” but I have my URLs set to clean otherwise).

If you could show or email your page template (the one used for the “archive” section, not default), that might reveal what is going on.

aesop1 · 2005-11-07 17:23:01

I just did a quick click through of your monthly archives and they seem to be working for the most part, but you occasionally will have a “one-off” day from the preceding month. Not sure what would be causing that (maybe a time offset issue of some sort — might not be a bad idea to check admin and article date settings. These kinds of problems have affected rss_suparchive as well).

FYI: It might be worth looking at Alex’s (Zem’s) archive solution presented here:
http://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?id=12395

While this approach is a little more verbose (in that you need some additional forms or page templates to make it work), it seems to be the most “official” looking solution available for TXP at this point in time.

Last edited by aesop1 (2005-11-07 17:25:58)

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#49 2005-10-18 15:18:02

Re: Archives

#50 2005-10-18 16:05:23

Re: Archives

#51 2005-10-18 16:18:00

Re: Archives

#52 2005-10-18 16:53:54

Re: Archives

#53 2005-10-18 17:29:29

Re: Archives

#54 2005-10-18 18:25:22

Re: Archives

#55 2005-10-18 20:03:57

Re: Archives

#56 2005-10-18 21:49:07

Re: Archives

#57 2005-10-19 18:41:06

Re: Archives

#58 2005-11-06 23:12:34

Re: Archives

#59 2005-11-07 17:06:10

Re: Archives

#60 2005-11-07 17:23:01

Re: Archives

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