Design Opus: Making media to kindle and communicate Vision

johnstephens · 2009-01-22 00:18:42

My Virginia-based web design site went online last week— amid the ruckus of several other projects that have been keeping me busy, and a-posting here for help.

Here are some production notes that happen to come to mind right now:

Pages: Most of the site is driven by one page, and my approach was inspired by Tim Van Damme.
Grids: I used a sixteen column grid adapted from Nathan Smith’s 960 Grid System for layout, but I didn’t use his CSS.
Speed: I made several notes about speeding up the site, some of which may be helpful for others running Textpattern.
Feed: Nathan Smith’s piece about using Feedburner with TXP is still mostly on-target.
404: It may be geeky, but I think the 404 error page I created is pretty cool. It grabs words from the request_uri and displays them in a search input. (I couldn’t get kml_searchkeywords to work.)

Useful admin plugins:

asy_jpcache
cnk_versioning (essential)
lam_accordion_section
rah_sitemap
rss_admin_db_manager, updated (essential)
rss_article_edit
smd_tags_admin
smd_where_used (essential)

Useful client-side plugins

adi_menu
cbs_navigation_menu (essential)
mg_txpversion
pap_contact_cleaner (essential)
rah_metas (essential)
rah_output_section_form (essential)
rah_replace
rss_auto_excerpt (essential)
rvm_if_this_article (essential)
smd_lib
smd_slimbox, for portfolio section— coming soon (essential)
smd_tags_client
upm_textile
zem_contact_lang (essential)
zem_contact_reborn (essential)

There’s probably more I should mention, but I can’t think of it right now. Thanks for your gracious support!

TNT · 2009-01-22 12:03:11

Uhm, I’m not sure if your site displays the way it should in IE 6. For example: it doesn’t look as if the style of your headings is displayed correctly. And the search box is particially covering the right side of your logo.

I don’t have another browser available here at work, so I don’t if it’s an IE-specific problem.

johnstephens · 2009-01-22 16:10:04

I forgot to mention— IE6 has its own stylesheet, which delivers a stripped-down design that is still usable. I am experimenting with DD_belatedPNG on my development version with great results, but I haven’t yet made those changes to the live server.

nemoorange · 2009-01-22 17:17:38

Hey John! Site looks very promising. Now that you’ve laid the foundation, I’ll be interested to see what sort of content you’ll be putting up. Everything looks ship-shape in Firefox on Windows for me! *Subscribed

Thanks for pointing out Nathan Smith’s Feedburner article. I’ll definitely be implementing this on my own creations.

As for the 404 page – how did you manage to do that request_uri? That’s pretty darn helpful.

johnstephens · 2009-01-22 17:28:12

nemoorange wrote:

Hey John! Site looks very promising. Now that you’ve laid the foundation, I’ll be interested to see what sort of content you’ll be putting up. Everything looks ship-shape in Firefox on Windows for me! *Subscribed

Thanks!

As for the 404 page – how did you manage to do that request_uri? That’s pretty darn helpful.

Here’s the relevant line of code:

<input type="text" id="search-ui" name="q" value="<txp:rah_replace from="/,-,%20,+,?=,_,&" to=", , , , , , "><txp:page_url type="request_uri" /></txp:rah_replace>" />

This goes in my search-ui form along with the other stuff necessary to render a search form. Then I have an output_form call in my 404 page. When the page loads <txp:page_url type="request_uri" /> loads in the search input, and the rah_replace plugin gets rid of the delimiters.

I don’t know if it really is useful, but I reckon I’ll know if I start seeing hits referred by the 404 page.

els · 2009-01-22 17:47:07

I like the design very much, and the 404 page is great!
I think that in the to attribute of the plugin tag you need to add a space before the first comma. At the moment it doesn’t replace the /; So, when I’m on your page /is/ and I add sometext to the URL (/is/sometext) the text in the search field is issometext.

johnstephens · 2009-01-22 18:04:01

Els wrote:

I like the design very much, and the 404 page is great!

Thank you, sir!

I think that in the to attribute of the plugin tag you need to add a space before the first comma. At the moment it doesn’t replace the /; So, when I’m on your page /is/ and I add sometext to the URL (/is/sometext) the text in the search field is issometext.

I tried it both ways, and I might go back to that.

The reason / is replaced with nothing is that request_uri always begins with a /— and for some reason Textpattern’s search doesn’t find articles from multiword search queries when there is a space at the beginning. For instance, searching for semantic XHTML works, but searching for

 semantic XHTML

(with a leading space) doesn’t.

If there was a way to tell rah_replace to get rid of the first / and turn all the others into spaces, that would be ideal. Why does request_uri have a leading / anyway? If it weren’t for the leading slash, you could use <txp:site_url /><txp:page_url type="request_uri" /> to display the url of the current page, but that doesn’t work— you end up with a link that looks like this: example.com//section/title-of-article.

Last edited by johnstephens (2009-01-22 18:06:03)

johnstephens · 2009-01-23 08:02:45

Els wrote:

I think that in the to attribute of the plugin tag you need to add a space before the first comma. At the moment it doesn’t replace the /; So, when I’m on your page /is/ and I add sometext to the URL (/is/sometext) the text in the search field is issometext.

Fixed.

The solution was to edit the plugin, changing str_replace() to preg_replace(). This allowed me to use a regular expression to distinguish a leading slash in the request_uri (which I needed to get rid of) from subsequent slashes (which I needed to replace with spaces).

str_replace() and preg_replace are not interchangeable functions— the PHP manual says:

If you don’t need fancy replacing rules (like regular expressions), you should always use [str_replace()] instead of ereg_replace() or preg_replace().

For that reason, I made a branch of Jukka’s magnificent plugin. It’s packed up and I think it’s ready to share. Let me know if you have any other suggestions!

Last edited by johnstephens (2009-01-23 08:14:46)

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