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#1 2007-07-13 19:30:26

snthr
Member
Registered: 2007-07-13
Posts: 42

site navigation issues in transferring a static site to textpattern

hi…

i’m new to textpattern, and i’m currently in the process of transferring the content of a completely static ‘old-school’ site — built page-by-page in html — into textpattern. i want to maintain the current navigation of the old site, and i’m wondering what the best way to do this is, specifically regarding sub-pages of static, semi-permanent information within a site section.

the site is for a theatre company, and they have a section with all their productions to date in it. the old site has the info set up with this folder structure:

site.com/productions/[year]/play-name/

so, one example of this would be:

site.com/productions/2001/macbeth/

the content-management/blogging software i’ve used most often before is wordpress, which has a fairly intuitive system for setting up this kind of folder structure, and then slotting the info into the resulting pages. however, textpattern doesn’t seem to be based around the same site-structuring logic, so i’m a bit confused as to the best way to set it all up.

is there a ‘best practice’ way of doing something like this in textpattern? i presume that the details of the play would be a single article, but how can i set up the folder structure to put it into?

thanks…

Last edited by snthr (2007-07-13 19:33:36)

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#2 2007-07-14 03:03:54

Mary
Sock Enthusiast
Registered: 2004-06-27
Posts: 6,236

Re: site navigation issues in transferring a static site to textpattern

“folders” are “sections” in Textpattern, however sub-sections are not yet supported. You could work around that, though, by simply tinkering with your url_titles.

Have a section named “productions”, and create your article, “Macbeth”. Then look under Advanced Options in the Write tab, and change your url title from “macbeth” to “2001/macbeth”.

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#3 2007-07-14 19:56:10

snthr
Member
Registered: 2007-07-13
Posts: 42

Re: site navigation issues in transferring a static site to textpattern

thanks for that. unfortunately, there seems to be a problem with putting a slash character — / — into the url. for example, site.com/productions/2001/macbeth doesn’t work, but there’s no problem with having a url that goes site.com/productions/2001-macbeth. any ideas?

a related problem is how to do up page templates for this content. i was thinking of having a page template called ‘production frontpage’ which will include an excerpt from each article, and then another called ‘production full’, which will be for including the full production details. however, am i making extra work for myself here? i was wondering if there might be a way to just have one page template for both functions.

thanks.

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#4 2007-07-14 22:54:55

sthmtc
Member
From: CGN, GER
Registered: 2005-01-17
Posts: 586
Website

Re: site navigation issues in transferring a static site to textpattern

for these kind of things i’m using gbp_permanent_links which allows to basically have any url structure you want to. if possible, i guess i’d setup “production” to be a section and “2001” to be a category. (that way it would also work without a plugin) if this is for some reasons impossible, then you could setup a custom field where you store the year of the production and create a corresponding link scheme (/section/custom_field/title) with gbp_permanent_links.

as for the second question: i’m keeping it all in one page template, with if_individual_article and if_article_list you can easily manage the display. also you can use “form” and “listform” as attributes in article tags… tons of ways to do it.

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#5 2007-07-16 00:58:17

Mary
Sock Enthusiast
Registered: 2004-06-27
Posts: 6,236

Re: site navigation issues in transferring a static site to textpattern

Bah. Turns out the problem is an encoding/mod_rewrite issue (note how the 404 is an Apache 404, not a Txp error page). :/ I’ll see if we can’t figure out a way to work around it, since it should be permissable to use slashes in URLs.

Last edited by Mary (2007-07-16 00:59:13)

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#6 2007-07-16 01:25:37

Mary
Sock Enthusiast
Registered: 2004-06-27
Posts: 6,236

Re: site navigation issues in transferring a static site to textpattern

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#7 2007-09-06 19:26:58

redbot
Plugin Author
Registered: 2006-02-14
Posts: 1,410

Re: site navigation issues in transferring a static site to textpattern

Mary wrote:

“folders” are “sections” in Textpattern, however sub-sections are not yet supported. You could work around that, though, by simply tinkering with your url_titles.
Have a section named “productions”, and create your article, “Macbeth”. Then look under Advanced Options in the Write tab, and change your url title from “macbeth” to “2001/macbeth”.

Mary,
are you sure this should work? it would be great but I can’t see how… I’ve tried to change taghandlers.php and txplib_misc.php with your modifications and it works in the sense that the url is displayed correctly in the browser… but, as I expected, it generates a “404 Not Found” error.
I’m not an expert so I could be wrong but I think this is a too much easy solution to the problem of creating pseudo nested sections.
I hope this makes sense, thank you in advance for any clarification.

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#8 2007-09-13 01:33:45

Mary
Sock Enthusiast
Registered: 2004-06-27
Posts: 6,236

Re: site navigation issues in transferring a static site to textpattern

It’s confusing to the URL parser, as I pointed out above. The conclusion was it’s too hackish to work properly, so…

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