My TXP Soapbox

Ace of Dubs · 2006-10-27 21:45:10

Watch out folks… Ace is on another one of his rants and you all know when he starts talking in the third person, things are bound to get a little wacky! :)

Okay so you probably all know how great TXP is and how it makes your sites lean, compliant and also improves health, sexlife, etc etc. Yet surely you have come across situations where you felt TXP getting in the way of your ideas, where the app started to give you friction on your road to progress. For all you fellow Textpatterners in the trenches, sweating out sleepless nights with your templates, plugins and hacks, this post’s for you!

The Branding Dilemna
Ace likes to make his clients feel special with branded CMS. They ooh and ahh as if in the presence of God when they see their little logo on top of so many controls. And Ace agrees with them.. you must have the patience of Christ in order to do this for every one of your clients. It’s always the same process.. open txplib_head.php, take out TXP logo (pretend not to see the ugly inline styles) Plant some Text or logo, then open up txp.css to style appropriately. It’s actually not that bad but….aww who are we kidding..it sucks!

The Branding Solution
Of course a lean semantic html on the admin side is desperately needed, and its coming, so Ace wont really harp on this. But we should really think to ourselves what would be the best way to make admin skinning more accessible..

But How?

Well, if you think about it we already have article forms, misc forms, link forms etc etc.. How about an admin form? A centralized block of code that would allow us to modify the header contents with ease. While we are at it, we could also make textpattern’s CSS file accessible through admin as well, (under Display Preferences.) These are functionalities that already exist in order to modify the site’s content… why not utilize them them to make the admin more flexible as well?

Of course this is only the tip of the iceberg and we wont see another inch until Crockery materializes a bit more. Still these are things to keep in mind.

The Clicking Dilemna

There is nothing like coming home after a long day of TXPing. Ace enjoys a good Korean manicure and massage on tough days, when TXP makes him click around needlessly. This is probably the biggest oversight made by most GUI developers. Though Ace admits it could be a lot worse … In this regard TXP certainly has done a better job than most. The interface is probably the cleanest out there, but after months of hardcore use, Ace finds himself wondering what the developers were thinking..

Less Clicks = :)

Perhaps some of you may feel differently, but it really makes no sense at all to have Categories all squirreled away in a separate tab. They should be allowed to play with their friends!
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Here we have Link Categories playing with Links.. don’t they look happy together?
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File Categories also seem to get along famously with Files
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And would you look at this… Article Categories in the same sandbox as Sections
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Isn’t that much better? The tools make more sense with their respective counterparts, and guess what? You’ve just eliminated the need for an entire tab in the already overcrowded Content section.

Smarter, Faster Content

While we are on the subject, has anyone else noticed that managing your content in TXP is a virtual exercise in tab-juggling – the images tab, the files tab, the write tab. It’s cool to be able to manage these things separately, but on the majority of occasions, people don’t need that level of control. 9 times out of 10, folks just want to add a few images, a file, or whatever to their document, directly in the write tab and be done with it.

Yeah it’s rough..but you gotta admit its pretty darn cool!

The Rigidity Issue

It would be foolish to suggest TXP be a solution for everyone. Part of the reason we all love it is for its small footprint and nimble dance moves. However there is room for more wiggle here. The fact that we can’t implement sub-sections, manage multiple installations or work with more than 10 custom fields is a brick wall, one we have all bumped our heads against at one time or another. Sure there are ways to work around this but none of them are all that intuitive for you, and your clients…well we all know what geniuses they can be when it comes to this stuff. So how can we make all of our lives easier?

Ace’s 3 Wishes

Add sub-sections to crockery… PLEASE! You can even keep it on the side as a module/element/whatever you want to call it.
Give us unlimited custom fields, on steroids . Clients should not have to look at blank custom fields cluttering up the write tab, the fields should be context aware and only show up in situations when they are needed. This certainly falls in line with TXP’s appeal for minimalism and efficiency.
Let’s all brainstorm on ways that TXP can manage multiple installs and also integrate with other software.

Is this all a pipe dream? Possibly. Am I asking for too much? I dont think so, but of course that’s easy for me to say :)
Honestly, TXP really is one of the best solutions out there and the fact that I go to sleep at night wondering how to make it better is a testament to the quality of its code, developers and community.

Feel free to tear my ideas apart, or even better..let’s actively collaborate and help push them into fruition. I’ll be adding some of this to the TASR Page but I’d like to get a lively debate going first..

So don’t be shy yall, step right up and make your three wishes, rant and cry like a baby or just tell me what a loser I am for spending this much time thinking about TXP. It doesnt matter – there is plenty of room on my soapbox for all :)

Last edited by Ace of Dubs (2006-10-27 21:46:26)

Mary · 2006-10-28 01:38:34

Things you know or should know: a cleaner, more stylable admin ui, sub-sections, custom fields, all these things are in the works or being planned. The latter is, in fact, possible to be plugin-ized in the interim.

But, sticking custom fields and categories only in the write tab (or other tabs) only works if you have very few and would result in even more clicking in the long-run.

marios · 2006-10-28 01:55:14

Ace, wonderful thoughts. Seems you have hit the nail on the head.
However, I might have something in my Sleeves as well, as a temporary workaround for less clicks, so stay tuned.

regards, marios

Destry · 2006-10-28 08:35:07

If nothing else, Ace, it was an enjoyable read. ;)

hazel · 2006-10-28 12:40:00

Nice work Ace.

Regarding the ‘number of clicks’ issue, I posted an idea for keyboard navigation/shortcuts on the TASR page.

It could be a good solution, as it should be fairly easy to make it happen, and it’s the way we are familiar with ‘power-using’ desktop apps.

Ace of Dubs · 2006-10-28 13:54:12

Glad u enjoyed guys :)

@ Mary, Re: Categories

I had thought about that too, particularly in the case of files and images, since they have that table underneath hogging up the horizontal real estate. One possible solution is to use the same JS you have in the write tab to show/hide blocks of controls. A simple text link: “Edit File Categories” would work splendidly and this way you could create content and sort it out all in the same tab.

I am still convinced this will save a lot of clicks (and newbies getting lost in the admin).. but even if you disagree, I hope it inspires you to rethink a few things while crockery is still in its experimental stages.

As a sidenote, do you even like any of my ideas? I always get the sensation that you don’t. But thats probably just your way, being a PHP robot crab and all… :)

@ Marios

Looking forward to it, friend. Your input is highly valued.. so dont leave us waiting too long! ;)

@ Hazel

I love what you are doing with the TASR page… you’ve laid out some great points and will put together a few new comps with them in mind when time permits.

As for the images you have on Flickr, I’d be glad to host them myself. If you’d like, you can sort those shots into folders, slap them inside a zip file and send to my email. This way we can update that page to have visual reference for everyone..

Keep me posted!

hakjoon · 2006-10-28 14:52:26

Ace of Dubs wrote:
As for the images you have on Flickr, I’d be glad to host them myself. If you’d like, you can sort those shots into folders, slap them inside a zip file and send to my email. This way we can update that page to have visual reference for everyone..

Why not just upload them into Textbook. Did that not work for some reason?

Destry · 2006-10-28 21:13:57

hakjoon wrote:

Why not just upload them into Textbook. Did that not work for some reason?

I was going to say the same thing (see, you’re the right man for the job). I figured that was already known, apparently not.

Yeah, you guys, add all those images to the wiki, with file upload and then link them into the TASR.

@Ace: You’re killin’ me.

merz1 · 2006-10-28 23:52:50

@Ace: Great article!

My wishes:

Multi language
Microformats (microformat editor or wizard)
Abstracts (read: more editor fields)

The last one “abstracts” would be an additional excerpt field. I am solving it today with the brand new updated version of rss_auto_excerpt but would love to have a default field for short article abstracts.

Also geotagging (part of microformats) is something I would love to have. It would be so nice to add an address (hCard) to an article and to get the geocoding via Google Map API.

(Google) Maps integration is a subject I am working on right now. The Google Maps API is great and I would love to have an easy way (tag) to integrate Google Maps into articles.

In general I would love to have more input fields to play around with. A good start would be to get all the different possibilities a newspaper CMS has. I won’t elaborate it now because then I would start mixing design and content :)

Maybe … Multi domain support, multi blog support (like LiveType)

Technically I would love to have support for creating static or semi static pages. Once an article is saved it could be possible to create a static HTML page which will only be updated when a used form is changed. Semi static would be i.e. pages with recent articles lists or tag clouds.

Last edited by merz1 (2006-10-29 00:12:16)

hakjoon · 2006-10-29 00:03:02

I want Article staging. To be able to work on an update of an article without affecting the currently published version.

That’s the one big thing I miss, and have no idea how to implement.

Merz1 what do you mean by loading javascript?

Last edited by hakjoon (2006-10-29 00:04:19)

merz1 · 2006-10-29 04:39:00

@hakjoon: Sorry, that was a stupid question which I deleted minutes later.

The deleted question was: How do I insert javascript inside of an article?
The answer is pretty simple: Use pure HTML and no textile and no line conversion.

I needed that answer/solution for a Google Map inside an article.

Article staging needs a new article status like “in progress” and a cookie which will only allow the person with the cookie to see that version. The cookie mechanism could be recycled from rss_article_edit. The disadvantage with the cookie solution is that you can’t share the article(s) in progress.

jakob · 2006-10-29 09:21:36

Great ideas but the thread is quickly taking off in different directions (well, I suppose it is a soapbox thread).

I think the back-end UI modifications/improvements should be conceived of – as far as is possible – to be independent of but open to new features, i.e. it should be open and flexible enough not to hinder extensibility. If they become dependent upon these then the danger is the admin UI improvements will never happen. For instance, I imagine that multi-language publishing and versioning add new layers to the core article storage/navigation txp-semantic and are therefore much more than admin improvements.

Also, when the other new idea features (extra abstract/excerpts) could be achieved using the existing admin features (i.e. that is already possible with modified custom fields*), then it would be helpful to elaborate on that or mock these up. For example, if when adding a new custom field one could choose the kind of input method (like Ace’s suggestion only expanded), then one programming task could work for many different uses. There are number of advantages: the implementation deliberations remain focussed, one task can help many and the admin remains uncluttered for those with no interest in those features.

*I’ve repurposed custom fields to look like title admin fields for a txp-based glossary (screenshot) using Ace’s custom-field mod.

Last edited by jakob (2006-10-29 09:30:35)

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Textpattern CMS support forum

#1 2006-10-27 21:45:10

My TXP Soapbox

#2 2006-10-28 01:38:34

Re: My TXP Soapbox

#3 2006-10-28 01:55:14

Re: My TXP Soapbox

#4 2006-10-28 08:35:07

Re: My TXP Soapbox

#5 2006-10-28 12:40:00

Re: My TXP Soapbox

#6 2006-10-28 13:54:12

Re: My TXP Soapbox

#7 2006-10-28 14:52:26

Re: My TXP Soapbox

#8 2006-10-28 21:13:57

Re: My TXP Soapbox

#9 2006-10-28 23:52:50

Re: My TXP Soapbox

#10 2006-10-29 00:03:02

Re: My TXP Soapbox

#11 2006-10-29 04:39:00

Re: My TXP Soapbox

#12 2006-10-29 09:21:36

Re: My TXP Soapbox

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