Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

hcgtv · 2009-09-27 23:18:04

sarah wrote:

Why no one has created a “This is how to create a one page website example” using textpattern is beyond me.

Ok, here goes:

1. Go into Presentation/Pages, and paste your HTML into the default page.
2. Replace the link to your stylesheet with <txp:css format=“link” />.
3. Go into Presentation/Style, paste your CSS into the default style.
4. Click view site.

jsoo · 2009-09-27 23:28:40

How does one take still pictures with a video camera? I don’t know, what would be the point?

For me, the biggest hurdle to transitioning from making traditional (static) sites to making Txp sites was not what I had to learn, it was what I had to unlearn. Building CMS sites requires experience in traditional web skills, but those skills also tend to engender a particular concept of what a website is. Transferring that concept to a CMS site is just making extra work without getting the benefits.

I agree that Txp’s documentation could be better, although lumping it all as “inadequate, long-winded essays” doesn’t fit the reality. Some of those long-winded essays are excellent, particularly Destry’s …

colak · 2009-09-28 04:19:14

Sarah, did you install txp anywhere?

If you didn’t it’ll be like learning to drive from a manual. If you know html which you say you do, learning txp will not be that difficult. You can initially install it in your own computer using MAMP or WAMP (depending on what OS you’re using) and play with it. Alternatively you caninstall it in a subdirectory in your site where people from this forum will be able to guide you through.

CMSs do not come with the kind of tutorials you are looking for but they come with great communities. Amd you will find that the txp one is one of the most helpful out there.

Install txp and we’ll be here to answer any specific questions.

iblastoff · 2009-09-28 06:54:31

sarah wrote:

Thanks, but I can think for myself. I pretty much taught myself HTM/ CSS and a bit of java in a few months between work, by myself.

However, there were clear step by step instructions on the net on how to create a simple one page website using the above skills in order to master the skills.

Textpatttern tutorials don’t provide that. The easiest way to learn something is by doing, usually by completing a task. The rest I can handle.

It’s all very good having a great CMS, but if the tutorials are inadequate, and are just basic long winded essays, then many will flee to greener pastures.

theres a HUGE difference between learning html/css (which are basically the easiest things in the world since its all completely static and there is no real programming involved) and learning how a cms works.

when you delve into the world of cms’s, logic and functions take over. if someone asked how to create a link in html, the answer is straight and simple. if you want to change font colour via css? easy. just type so and so.

asking how to create a page in a cms is a completely different approach. you don’t have straight and simple answers. you are now trying to create a dynamic page, so wouldn’t it make sense that you could construct a page dynamically? there are a ton of ways to do it depending on your exact needs. theres a reason theres a ton of html/webpage generators ala dreamweaver etc etc etc but there really is no such thing as a ‘cms code generator’.

trying to learn any decent cms out there is overwhelming at first. i know it was when i first started using textpattern. but i kind of find it hard to believe that you didn’t even pick up anything useful at all from the various links already provided in this forum and you sound like you just want to be handheld through the process. i am guessing you haven’t even looked at the default template provided by a fresh txp install to get a general look and feel at how things are structured.

Last edited by iblastoff (2009-09-28 07:01:05)

sarah · 2009-09-28 17:13:23

Thanks all. But I’ve gone over to Modx. CMS made simple has had far too many security breaches!

hcgtv · 2009-09-28 18:00:58

sarah wrote:

But I’ve gone over to Modx.

Damn it, lost another user to MODx ;)

jstubbs · 2009-09-28 18:18:42

May I ask why you chose MODX over TXP?

nabrown78 · 2009-09-28 23:04:30

Gee whiz people, there is no reason to be snarky to a potential new user of TXP. It may be that TXP is overly powerful for what Sarah wants to accomplish, but maybe her query also highlights a lack of beginner information out there. There are lots of tips, tricks, snippets, etc., but a lot of it is for people who already have a handle on the basics. The the book Textpattern Solutions is excellent, but someone may not want to invest in that before they are SURE they want to use TXP.

Bloke · 2009-09-29 00:15:25

nabrown78 wrote:

It may be that TXP is overly powerful for what Sarah wants to accomplish

Or perhaps not. Sarah said “my site also includes javascript and I wish to use a CMS as it is a ecommerce site and needs to be updated regularly”. As we know, ecommerce is a big deal, but that’s beside the point that Nora is making. There do seem to be a lack of tutorials that mimic the ones sarah cited on the CMSms page. Is there a reason for this? Perhaps…

In CMSms Step 2 it’s essentially saying that you create one Page for each static page you had in your old site, copy just your content and assign it a template (it doesn’t tell you how to make one of these though).

Expanding on jsoo’s post #7 a little to be even more explicit:

decide which pages (Articles in TXP) need to have the same sort of look and feel — make a Section to hold each type of Article. Choose one to work on
copy and paste one of your old HTML pages to a new TXP Page then remove the content, leaving just the general structural HTML markup as a template. Where you want to see the content, put <txp:article />; where you want to see the article’s title, put <txp:title />; and so on. There’s a TXP tag for every part of an article, and more besides
in Presentation->Style create a new stylesheet and paste your old one in
assign this Page and Stylesheet to the relevant Section you decided in step 1
Go to the Write tab, copy n paste the same HTML page from your old site and edit out all the structural markup, leaving just the content in the Body field. Any intrinsic <p> and <br> tags are fine for now but you may want to investigate Textile when writing new articles. Put the article Title in the Title field and an optional excerpt in the Excerpt field. Choose in which Section your article is to appear and Publish it
View your site and navigate to the Section. Your page shows up
Repeat step 5 for each article in this Section
Repeat steps 2-5 each time you want to ceate a set of articles with a different look and feel

This won’t address TXP’s powerhouse feature — using Forms to format lists of articles or to hold snippets of oft-used content/markup — but, rightly or wrongly, it does a similar job as the CMSms tutorial.

Taken at face value, the above seems incredibly complicated, which is probably why the current TXP tutorials go to great pains to explain the ethos and semantics behind TXP’s Pages, Forms, Sections, Articles, etc. Especially the excellent Textpattern First Steps, and Destry’s articles.

My guess is that a tutorial like the one sarah cited doesn’t exist precisely because taking some time up front to orient oneself in The TXP Way ^TM will ease the process of doing the above; especially when you want to change one thing and have to wade through a hundred articles if you’d done it all in the manner CMSms implies!

But if anyone feels there’s a gap in the docs and is compelled to write such a tutorial then Textbook would be all the richer.

sarah · 2009-09-29 00:20:34

1. Textpattern, without a doubt, is one of hte most secure open source CMS’s out there. It clearly is a very very well written CMS.

2. Textpatten has a long history and is cited often as being the most trustworthy.

However,

3. Textpattern’s UI is rather….dated and fiddly. Heck, even the forum layout leaves a lot to be desired.

4. Textpattern has yet to produce an indepth tutorial example on how to create a single page website, which is the most effective way for a person to develop their undestanding on how textpattern works. The English video tutorials by textpattern users on youtube also suck, and are rather innacurate in some aspects.

jsoo · 2009-09-29 00:55:51

sarah wrote:

Textpattern has yet to produce an indepth tutorial example on how to create a single page website, which is the most effective way for a person to develop their undestanding on how textpattern works.

It’s an interesting comment, because it is clearly the most effective way for you to start down that road, and you have helped us indentify a clear need in the docs. It might well be that this is a minority preference; on the other hand it might be that the Txp community has self-selected to users who prefer to start with theory before wading in to tags, and hence all the tutorials get written that way. Effective teaching has to cater to different learning styles. I would characterize this one as the “Hello, World!” approach — get something, anything, happening as soon as possible to give the learner a feeling of control and familiarity.

Somewhat tangentially, even before this thread came up I was musing about available tutorials, tips, and so on (here and here, for instance), and about taking a stab at something broader in scope than isolated “tips”. Just posted what I see as the first installment in a projected series with a focus on basics. This first piece certainly isn’t advocacy, nor is it a tutorial, more of an opinionated overview. “Long Winded” are my middle names, so it’s none too concise. I don’t see this one as fitting in to TextBook so will leave it on my personal site for now.

Some high-quality screencasts would be very helpful too. I have this vague idea of trying some when I finally get around to upgrading my laptop to something that will run OS X.6, which apparently has built-in support for this.

Bloke · 2009-09-29 01:15:08

sarah wrote:

Textpattern’s UI is rather….dated and fiddly.

One person’s whizz-bang-swish is another person’s annoyance; and vice versa. The good news is that the admin themes ~~http://textgarden.org/layouts/?c=txp-admin~~ can help. Most of the ones available at the moment are simple colour scheme changes but a few of them go further — and there’s plenty more to come as people get more adventurous with the system, which has only been available for about a month so far.

Textpattern has yet to produce an indepth tutorial example on how to create a single page website

True, for all the reasons jsoo mentions and more. To be fair, the CMSms one you cited is hardly in-depth ;-) As a non-user of CMSms, the line-item “Assign a template to the new page” would have me scratching my head as I wouldn’t know how to make the template do what I wanted. But we do have the Textbook wiki, so if anyone writes one that’s useful to the community it’ll end up there. And as jsoo points out, that may happen now we know there’s a need for one.

The English video tutorials by textpattern users on youtube also suck, and are rather innacurate in some aspects

I didn’t even know there were any! Just had a look and there are only two from this year and they cover simple tasks like managing articles. So if you want a one-stop start-to-finish create-one-page-in-TXP tutorial you’re out of luck at the moment.

For the record I have yet to find an engaging video tutorial on any subject, let alone CMSs. It seems that every tutorial I’ve ever sat through — be it for Photoshop, Lightwave, Wordpress, Dreamweaver, whatever — have all been created by people with a penchant for the soporific ;-)

EDIT: of course, the problem with a screencast or video tutorial on YouTube is that once it’s published it’s there for eternity, as to update it you have to delete it and upload a new one when a new version comes out, losing all the comments/view stats, etc. So unless there’s a steady stream of video tutorial writers for any platform, content is always going to get stale. Must be a real bugbear for WP videographers as there’s a new version out every 8 minutes :-p

EDIT2: nice write-up, jsoo. Very smart.

Last edited by Bloke (2009-09-29 01:21:06)

JanDW · 2009-09-29 01:55:32

Sarah, this article on how to create a simple portfolio/blog with txp might help you It gives concrete code samples as well as a word of explanation.

Also, you can select a different forum theme under profile then display – I think David DeSandro’s “tabula” is much better. I customized them a little myself using greasemonkey and the files he provides here

See? All your problems are getting washed away like when you’re showering away little bits of skin from other people after a long transatlantic flight. What has Modx ever done for you?

I think Jeff and Stef (not to be confused with Jef and Steff) gave some clear and concise info in this thread too though.

Last edited by JanDW (2009-09-29 01:56:09)

masa · 2009-09-29 01:58:34

Sarah, it might help, if you could tell us, how you used to create websites before.
For instance did you hand-code in a text editor or use a visual editor such as Dreamweaver?

True, there isn’t a tutorial on how to create a one-page site.
However it sort of comes included with the basic installation: I was able to pick it up by dissecting the default page template and referring to the FAQ

3. Textpattern’s UI is rather….dated and fiddly.

Opinions on this seem to differ. I find it refreshingly simplistic and straight forward.
Any specific gripes?

hcgtv · 2009-09-29 03:16:14

sarah wrote:

3. Textpattern’s UI is rather….dated and fiddly. Heck, even the forum layout leaves a lot to be desired.

That’s why Sarah moved on, it wasn’t the tutorials or lack there of, it’s how nice the MODx experience is.

MODx runs a rather nicely designed SMF forum, heck I’m even tempted to sign on just to play around with it. This forum is indeed dated, the search leaves a lot to be desired and at present there is no upgrade path. I’ve championed PunBB for many years, but even I have to admit that at this point, it’s better to move on, than to continue maintaining a heavily modded forum.

The use of Textile, where every forum uses BBCode, has never really made much sense to me. I use Textpattern daily, but I never have to enter code snippets in my articles, where here, it happens quite often. The most I do in my articles is link to an external site, make something bold or italic, and include an image, but the interface does this for me. So I come here and often times I have to open up a tab to textile.thresholdstate.com, just to make a post. Then I go to another forum and end up entering textile where I should be entering bbcode, I curse a bit, then have to edit the post. So does Textile save me time, no, it actually slows me down.

The design of the home page is coming soon, but it’s not going to make much of an impact on the user experience if linking from the home page takes them to another property that looks antiquated. What MODx has, as do the more popular projects on the web, is a cohesive look and feel.

I love my Debian, because I’ve had many good years with it, but Ubuntu sure looks good ;)

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#16 2009-09-27 23:18:04

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#17 2009-09-27 23:28:40

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#18 2009-09-28 04:19:14

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#19 2009-09-28 06:54:31

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#20 2009-09-28 17:13:23

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#21 2009-09-28 18:00:58

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#22 2009-09-28 18:18:42

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#23 2009-09-28 23:04:30

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#24 2009-09-29 00:15:25

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#25 2009-09-29 00:20:34

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#26 2009-09-29 00:55:51

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#27 2009-09-29 01:15:08

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#28 2009-09-29 01:55:32

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#29 2009-09-29 01:58:34

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

#30 2009-09-29 03:16:14

Re: Detailed instructions on how to create a site with textpattern?

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