planning my first Textpattern driven site - any advice.?

lister · 2009-07-22 13:09:31

Texpattern newbie seeks advice..

I’m about to build my first Textpattern driven site and have been planning a simple
artist collaboration website where artists can post images and add text to there own
page, and not effect any other pages. The artist page will have a sticky bio on the left
with images on the right. (most recent work on the top) and maybe have 10 art pieces,
then after that there page splits to a second (previous) page.

The artists will have to be given and username and password generated by the
admin, not a self registration.

There will only be 3 pages Home/Forum/Contact, Home will display an image of the
latest work from any one of the artists. Below that will have a list of thumbs of the artists, these being
a link to there individual pages. I also need to include a basic forum where the artists can talk
about current work, not sure how the register would work here, would they have to re-register
just for the forums, I suppose they will?.. and a contact page, but I may incorporate this into the footer.

How easy would this be to build in Textpattern? The home page will need to have thumbs
generated at different sizes one for the artist thumbs linked to there page and another thumb for
most recent artist work.

Could someone help with any tips on how to best plan and build this site.
Are there any plugin/links for a basic forum and image/thumbs plugin.

any tips please…

Please see the link below

homepage mockup link
artsitpage mockup link

Thanks for your time

Bloke · 2009-08-07 13:47:30

Hi, sorry this one fell between the cracks.

Your plan sounds fine and I’m sure TXP can do it with some plugins. I’ll throw in a few tidbits here, but no doubt others will show you better ideas because I tend to overcook stuff :-)

Probably the best method is to make a section for your artists and then create one article per artist. Since you’re assigning logins manually, it’s just one extra step to create an empty article for them as part of the process (with the upm_savenew plugin you can clone an existing artist’s page and clear out the irrelevant content).

I would suggest using the article Excerpt as the bio. Custom fields could hold any additional info if required (vital stats, perhaps an upcoming event they may have, etc). Optionally you can assign a mugshot of the artist to the article image field.

For the actual artwork there are a couple of ways of going. The first is to create an image category either with the same name as the artist’s article (so it is easy to associate images to an artist) or with some other unique reference such that all artwork can be collected together. You could nest categories here if you wish, perhaps these two levels of “artist” and “collection” are enough to hold the images:

Joanna Pawlowska
- Showcase 1
  - —> Work on paper
  - —> Puppet
  - —> Shot many times
- My world
  - —> Desk
  - —> Computer
  - —> Pencils
Stef Dawson
- Random photos
  - —> Licence to hose
  - —> Bean head
  - —> Weirdo

and so on.

The image in Textpattern is currently fairly limited because you don’t have a lot of scope for data describing it (and you need a plugin to get it to the screen). You only really have alt and caption to play with. The former should ideally be used for the browser/search engines, so that leaves you with caption in which to squeeze all the lovely info about the piece of art; that’s quite limiting. You can of course embed HTML here to pretty it up, but the success of that’ll depend on how well versed your artists are with HTML markup.

An alternative approach might be to create a new section called ‘artwork’. You won’t necessarily “see” that section on the site, but you can set it as the default so all artists post to that section automatically. You then have the entire article at your disposal: one article per piece of artwork. The excerpt, the body text, the custom fields for additional data, the article image for a photo of it. This setup allows the ability to slice and dice the artwork by artist or category natively, which is useful.

Your ‘gallery’ of thumbs is then one random article chosen from each author’s list of articles. And authors can only edit/delete their own articles anyway.

With some plugins you can streamline the process:

lam_image_uploader for assigning images to articles (there are others like upm_image_popper and jmd_image_selector)
sed_section_fields for only showing certain custom fields when posting in certain sections
glz_custom_fields for adding more + different types of custom field

and there are plugins out there somewhere for limiting the article list to only the currently logged in author, and for creating more than one image size from a single uploaded image.

As for the rest of the site, you’ll need zem_contact_reborn for the contact page and there is a simple forum plugin called TXPhorum which might interest you. Though if you want to use it I suggest you give me a shout instead of using the official version. I’ve done extensive work with a few people on it to take it up a notch. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to get going, but if you put a bit of effort into the Forms it works really well. I can give you a login on my test server to play with it if you like. The only downside is that each post+reply becomes a new article in your list of articles, so it can become a little messy on that screen. There are ways round that if it’s a problem.

Of course, if you’re brave you can try embedding another third party forum into TXP. I’m not the best source of info on that one but I know of people here who have done it.

Hope some of that is useful. There are a number of ways to approach this and I’m sure someone else can show you more tricks.

renobird · 2009-08-08 01:00:19

Stef,

You never cease to amaze me with the detail of your replies.

:)

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#1 2009-07-22 13:09:31

planning my first Textpattern driven site - any advice.?

#2 2009-08-07 13:47:30

Re: planning my first Textpattern driven site - any advice.?

#3 2009-08-08 01:00:19

Re: planning my first Textpattern driven site - any advice.?

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