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4.2 Recommend 2 workflows...
Diving back into Textpattern is as challenging as I remember it being.
What are some “best practices” for moving from a back-of-the-napkin idea to a blank whiteboard to a finished site under these two possibilities:- Restyling an existing weblog with fresh 4.2 features & a new design?
- Starting with a theme that still needs different colors or comment styling or archive functionality, etc.?
Specifically, do I need Firefox with the developer plugins? Should I be trying to understand and use something like a grid system?” I’ve got lists of changes I want to make, but what’s my best method for changing the site?
As always, I appreciate the help of you experts!
“Well, I, uh, don’t think it’s quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.” General ‘Buck’ Turgidson
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Re: 4.2 Recommend 2 workflows...
It really depends on a number of factors:
- restyle: how well ordered your existing site is in terms of txp and html markup. A well-structured txp site with good semantic markup may be easier to restyle using the existing txp site as its basis. Here you will be working most with css and may not need to change too much in txp except for additional functionality. But if it’s grown unwieldy over the years, it can be surprisingly refreshing to ditch the old convoluted methods and recode using 4.2 (for example, this applies particularly to pre-4.07 sites that used tricks and workarounds to do things that are now more straightforward to achieve with the new tag-in-tag parser).
- template: how well thought through and complete the desired template is and how near it is to your own idea of how you want your site to be. You’ll generally find that templates usually offer a few basic views, e.g. an individual article and a list view and not all templates are extensively styled either. If you find one that is close to what you want design-wise, you may not need to change much in the way of css but you may find that you have to delve into the txp tags in more detail to adapt the template to your specific requirements and, of course, to add additional/missing functionality.
In addition to the above, your decision may also be influenced by what you feel more competent in: css restyling or txp adaptation.
As regards firefox and firebug/web developer toolbar, or other tools such as CSSedit, they are certainly invaluable in examining your page structure and tracking down css problems.
I don’t think you need to learn things like 960.gs or similar unless you really want to. In my view, they are particularly good as a layout framework for people who regularly develop sites from scratch (once you have learned the layout patterns and css classes, you can build new grid-based page layouts very quickly) but I would not bother for a one-off development, particularly if your existing site already has a well-named html structure. There are numerous discussions as to whether such layout-oriented (e.g. visual relationship) frameworks subvert the semantic structure (e.g. meaning-relationships) of page elements and likewise various different hybrid frameworks that try and marry both aspects.
Last edited by jakob (2010-07-03 13:47:58)
TXP Builders – finely-crafted code, design and txp
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Re: 4.2 Recommend 2 workflows...
Jakob, thanks! You’ve saved me from several false starts and blind alleys.
I’m going to focus on a localhost copy of my site along with Firefox & it’s developer tools so that I can visualize what some desired changes will require. My site is upgraded to 4.2, but the HTML & CSS date to Textpattern back in January of 2005.
Your advice will save weeks of learning by trial and error.
“Well, I, uh, don’t think it’s quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.” General ‘Buck’ Turgidson
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