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Re: Textpattern Semantics: A General Revelation
>> WHAT DOES THE
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Re: Textpattern Semantics: A General Revelation
First of all, Dean: At this point, all I would add to your UI changes is more of the little “?” boxes with links to help text that covers the basics of textpattern semantics. Other than that I definitely consider this to be a huge leap forward.
On the “Default” section option: It appears that I was right in my initial assumption about its purpose. I was mislead by my experimenting, however because the option is somewhat broken. When you set a section to “default,” textpattern does not unset the “default” option in the other sections. When you click the “write” tab, txp appears to simply run down the list of sections and pick the first one it finds with the default option set to Yes.
When 1.15 comes out I will update the article and highlight the changes here.
<b>> michaeln3 wrote:</b>
<i>> Might it possibly be a good idea to have some sort of section titled “static” or something that allowed one to set an article to section “static” and it could be accessed from the root directory of textpattern? This would facilitate generating things like About pages for sites that had lots of static content, as well as dynamic content.</i>
It is already very easy to do this. Create your section (e.g., “static_section”) and then create a page (e.g., “static_page”). This page can contain any XHTML stuff you want, including static content. You can type your static content right into the page rather than going through the article posting mechanism.
<b>If you’re finding it hard to grasp my last post:</b> Just skip to the paragraph that opens with “Here’s what you need to know.” It should all flow from there. If you didn’t understand what robert was getting at, then don’t worry about it, it was a pretty specialized case.
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Re: Textpattern Semantics: A General Revelation
Also, I’m not sure how this could be done in Textpattern, but I’m finding it helps to think of “Front Page” as a section in its own right, that always uses the page labeled “default” and the stylesheet labeled “default”. (There isn’t a way to change this afaik, not that it’s necessary.) This section has no articles of its own, it only aggregates from other sections.
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Re: Textpattern Semantics: A General Revelation
“This section has no articles of its own, it only aggregates from other sections.”
Then maybe “index” would be a more semantically sound way to name the section?
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Re: Textpattern Semantics: A General Revelation
Index has its own problems – my idea of an index is what you’d find at the end of a book. That’s not really a blog main page…
I do like the word aggregate, though it’s hard to come up with a term that’s easy to use. Aggregator just sounds like something you’d buy in a road-side stand in Florida.
This is an important issue, as I hardly need to tell this crowd. The whole naming scheme really makes or breaks it…
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Re: Textpattern Semantics: A General Revelation
In the process of updating the article….something just occured to me. The “organise” tab appears under the “content” section, when in fact it contains stuff pertaining to both Content and Presentation. Namely, Site Sections are a presentation issue whereas everything else is a content issue.
There’s two approaches to dealing with this. Either splitting the “Site Sections” function into its own tab under “Presentation”; or, making “Organise” a top-level tab like Content and Presentation. I lean toward keeping all the organisation-related stuff in one place, so I favour the second route.
Additionally, within the Organise tab, I would visually divide the functions into which hierarchy they fall into, Content or Presentation. This has already been done somewhat with whitespace added between “Site Sections” and the other three areas, but perhaps some kind of text heading and maybe color coding would help make it clear. This would let people know, not only is there a difference between the two, but exactly what that difference is.
Any thoughts?
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Re: Textpattern Semantics: A General Revelation
<a href=“http://www.jdueck.net/articles/textpattern.html”>Article</a> has been updated for g1.15 and general usefulness.
Changes worth mentioning:- New section on permalinks
- New section on the idea of front page as its own section
- Removed UI complaints that were specific to g1.14 and lower
- Fixed validation and minor formatting
- In the definitions list, clarified that sections are accessed via URL
I’m still trying to keep it brief. At some point I also want to add a simple explanation of the two kinds of textpattern codes, atomic and non-atomic.
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Re: Textpattern Semantics: A General Revelation
I’m wrestling with what to do with the organise tab right now. It may indeed end up being bumped up to the first level of tabs.
Great work, Joel.
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Re: Textpattern Semantics: A General Revelation
By why have both Sections and Pages? The concepts behind each seems somehow similar to me…
Btw; Maybe “default” in Pages, should be called Front Page?
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#22 2004-03-21 00:24:05
- msinger
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- Registered: 2004-03-06
- Posts: 2
Re: Textpattern Semantics: A General Revelation
I need a few more pointers here to fully understand the most effecient and logical way to use the structural components in this program.
It seems to me Textpattern can be described as being an aggregation/presentation interface, with edit tools.
From the aggregation point of view perhaps an explanation from the bottom up i. e. the purpose of the smallest or most local component through the largest or most global component within a practical site structure would be helpful.
I don’t understatnd the relationship of ‘Form’ to ‘Article’ or ‘Page’ and I don’t understand the relationship of ‘Page’ to the sylesheet when it comes to combining static elements like navigation and logo elements with dynamic elements like articles and calendars onto the same page using the predefined style id(s) and classes.
Specifically I have a few pages already coded and referencing css stylesheet files for presentation. I want to incorporate those pages into the database have them be able to diplay additional dynamic info as well as link to new dynamic pages all managed in the same DB.
I was able to make the index.php file bring up the first of these static pages, and display it using the formatting I want by creating a Section called home and assigning a Page called home to that section. The Page is a port of my original home page xhtml. I stripped out the style sheet reference in the code and used TP to link that page with the stylesheet info.That all works and displays as expected. However I haven’t been able to figure out how to incorporate the additional static pages into TP gracefully or how to navigate to them properly.
I suspect that my initial choice to create a Section ‘home’ and a Page ‘home’ was a bad choice and is at the root of my problem.
Any suggestions would be warmly appreciated.
Last edited by msinger (2004-03-21 00:40:11)
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Re: Textpattern Semantics: A General Revelation
I don’t get it. Static content….there’s lots of ways. The simplest is just upload it to your site via FTP and link to it from within your textpattern pages, like any other normal static web content.
Did you read the article that is the subject of this thread? Seriously, with that and studying the example stuff that comes with Textpattern it should be at least somewhat understandable. Your questions seem to betray a very fundamental misunderstanding of how this is supposed to work, and I’m not sure exactly where to begin.
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Re: Textpattern Semantics: A General Revelation
> I suspect that my initial choice to create a Section
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