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[contrib] New Textplates round
Hello all,
I am one of these leisure-bloggers, that always heads over to textplates and textgarden to see if there any good templates for my blog. Unfortunately there is no real momentum in developing front-end themes anymore, however it appears as if developers come up with quite a few admin templates these days.
Now I thought it might be fun, to have another round of textplates (after all, it has been three years since the last competition). I think there are quite a lot of other textpattern enthusiasts that would like to see a wider selection of templates available. Maybe we could be able to have (small donations) that might end up in a big prize for the contect winner (did anyone say iPad?).
What are your thoughts on another templates contest to motivate people to develop some more front-end themes?
Last edited by stephan (2010-02-14 18:20:00)
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Note: I am currently not actively using Textpattern, so I am not in the forums very often
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Re: [contrib] New Textplates round
I’m up for that, I’ve been thinking about creating some Textpattern templates recently after doing my admin themes. I think it would be good to have categories for entry, i.e. design a blog, one-page portfolio, business site etc
What do you think?
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Re: [contrib] New Textplates round
I am not convinced that there are enough entries to justify several categories ;-)
After thinking and sleeping on it I really feel like organizing a new round, if the interest is there. It would be great if anyone interested just added something like a “I like it” or so to this discussion :-)
Yoko for Textpattern – A free blog theme • Minimum Theme – If all you want to do is write.
Note: I am currently not actively using Textpattern, so I am not in the forums very often
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Re: [contrib] New Textplates round
“I like it.” :)
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Re: [contrib] New Textplates round
I love it!
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Re: [contrib] New Textplates round
Game on.
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Re: [contrib] New Textplates round
Go for it. :)
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Re: [contrib] New Textplates round
Good fun.
As for packaging themes, is there any consensus on best format? Use hcg_templates? Whatever works, works?
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Re: [contrib] New Textplates round
Ok, now I am convinced I will try to get a new textplates round organized. Any ideas or advice are greatly appreciated, by the way. That includes – but is of course not limited to – suggestions for prizes (and if possible people to talk to about them), members for our jury and potential rules for entering (e.g. can existing templates be entered?).
Yoko for Textpattern – A free blog theme • Minimum Theme – If all you want to do is write.
Note: I am currently not actively using Textpattern, so I am not in the forums very often
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#11 2010-03-01 20:09:43
- peleve
- New Member
- From: McHenry, MD
- Registered: 2010-02-24
- Posts: 4
Re: [contrib] New Textplates round
I’m new to Textpattern and have immersed myself in it for a solid week now. It’s definitely the system I want to learn, but I have yet to create something myself. Wherever and whatever I read always appears to assume that you know the system already!
Anyway, rather than working on a new set of templates, there is a real need to cleanup the existing templates and tutorials, e.g., make them clean with Textpatttern 4.2. So far I have tried over a dozen templates and only got one to work as advertised.
I would also like to see an installer for a template, not the tedious and error prone cut & paste approach. This seems to me a little retarded. Ideally, the installer should be a script that you can invoke from Admin and which loads all of the forms, styles, modules, files, images, sections and especially sample data (articles).
Sorry to bitch, but other systems are easier to get started with, but they don’t have the overall potential that Textpattern does.
Once I get up to speed I’ll gladly help where I can.
Solving one problem at the time.
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Re: [contrib] New Textplates round
peleve,
you are absolutely right that the templating system isn’t one of Textpattern’s strong points. But if you use hcg_templates or mem_templates (basically hcg_templates that includes plug-ins) it gets a lot easier. I think it is important that template designers are aware of these existing templates.
Textplates is all about the fun of designing new (and hopefully easy to use) templates for Textpattern. Since the last rounds took place way before the latest version of 4.2.0 came out “fixing” older templates would actually be an interesting approach, but I think most authors would not take the time to do so. Ease of installation is definitely one of the criteria for the textplates entries, so maybe the resulting themes get a lot easier and more “fool-proof” to install.
Yoko for Textpattern – A free blog theme • Minimum Theme – If all you want to do is write.
Note: I am currently not actively using Textpattern, so I am not in the forums very often
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Re: [contrib] New Textplates round
peleve wrote:
there is a real need to cleanup the existing templates and tutorials
Hopefully a new round of Textplates will actually address this. The problem is usually that older templates suffer from tag rot (tags renamed or altered) and they are often distributed with old versions of plugins that no longer work on newer versions of TXP.
But the templates that are out there are quite often used / modified so if anybody uses a template that isn’t quite up to scratch, a contest such as this is a chance to update it for a new audience and the newer capabilities of TXP. Anyone can take anybody else’s template and modify it; I hope people will take the opportunity to do so.
I would also like to see an installer for a template, not the tedious and error prone cut & paste approach.
Yeah it’s a nice idea which is unfortunately a double-edged penguin. Having easy to use & install templates means that people can get off the ground quicker with a look that suits them for the type of site they’re trying to create. But the downside is that might mean that TXP falls into the Wordpress trap whereby truckloads of people just use the same default theme without modifying it.
On one hand, TXP’s beauty is its diversity — I would guess that’s partly because you do have to think about design and content and how it all gels together a little more than other CMS tools — but at the same time its smallish community could actually be testament to the fact it has a steep learning curve and no easy to install templates!
btw, have you looked at the hcg_templates or mem_templates plugins? They make it (slightly) easier to manage this stuff.
Mildly OT: I have recently been discussing with some prominent members of the community about the prospect of taking a fresh look at templating but we’ve yet to find a reliable system. The problem is that stuff needs importing into the database and Sections need to be created, with Pages and Stylesheets associated with them; plugins installed, activated, etc. It would be nice if a template could be a self-contained disk unit that you could try out — a bit like using a glorified version of smd_admin_themes but for front-of-house themes — and when you have flicked through them and found the one you want, you can choose to install it properly into the database. That’s not outside the scope of possibility, but it’s non-trivial, especially if you already have Articles and Forms and Pages defined within existing Sections.
Once I get up to speed I’ll gladly help where I can.
That would really be appreciated. The documentation on Textbook is in constant need of tweaking and tidying so the more people that can get wiki accounts and help out the better. Thanks!
EDIT: stephan beat me to it with far more succinct points :-)
Last edited by Bloke (2010-03-01 21:19:46)
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#14 2010-03-03 04:33:48
- peleve
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- From: McHenry, MD
- Registered: 2010-02-24
- Posts: 4
Re: [contrib] New Textplates round
Sorry, I was off the air for a day.
With all of my googling, and looking at hundreds of pages, I never came across hcg_templates and mem_templates. These concepts are great and perhaps not perfect, but an enormous improvement. The hcg_templates approach is perfectly workable. I tried hcg_templates with the mistylook and crystalx templates and got the latter to work, but not until I fixed some issues: 1) had to change “sitename” to “site_name” in both mistylook and crystalx 2) change “.html” to “.form” or “page” as appropriate in mistylook, and 3) (no where explained that I can see) to make things work you have to change the “default” value in of “default’ in Presentations>Sections – to me counter intuitive.
This is very symptomatic of Texpattern… A lot of errors or incomplete things in examples. It turns most people off!
Bloke’s comment: “But the downside is that might mean that TXP falls into the Wordpress trap whereby truckloads of people just use the same default theme without modifying it.” I don’t see at all. I would guess that 99.9% of the web surfers have no idea what a website was produced with, and couldn’t care less. A website is attractive foremost by its content. The content is what make people come to it. Keep in mind the old saying “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” I would have no problems with 100 websites of the same look, as long as there is content, but I would like a nice look, which is what Textpattern can be!
If you want Textpattern to be accepted as a serious tool then a novice must get a good experience with it. You may not realize, but a novice is just someone who is trying to decide where to spend the company’s money, what to recommend, and they want to make sure that they understand what they are recommending. There is no better way than letting them put together a small website with ease.
You already have a good system for the geek programmer. If you want to bring it up a notch. Make it easy for a novice! From everything that I’ve seen and gone trough the past week here are my recommendations:
1. Get the simple install (hcg or mem templates) perfected. Have it tested by a number of “beginners”
2. Get all of the existing templates conformed to the “simple install” method in a simple database. Make sure that a sample page is shown.
3. Get several good tutorials aimed at the beginner. (there are several good ones around but they are outdated and don’t work completely as advertised)
4. Port templates from other systems. The more the merrier. People will tinker with them.
5. Work on the documentation
6. Do Template 2010
Make quality your number one priority!
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Re: [contrib] New Textplates round
I agree that installing and trying out templates is not a one-click option in textpattern and many of the points you make are valid, especially with regard to user-experience and outdated templates. Making things easier to use out of the box, providing better step-by-step and up-to-date tutorials would help make it easier to adopt txp.
To a certain extent, I find templates in txp a little ‘illusory’ in that they modify the look, creating the impression of a nearly finished homepage but, except for the simplest of cases (e.g. as the standard blog-article format), most fall short of providing a full structure for your homepage just waiting for you to drop in content. In other words, in many cases after installing a template you are soon faced with the “what next?” question. People then looking for a “switch on and go” calendar module or forum module etc. will be disappointed not to find these, though there are plugins available to help you build these.
I think it helps to understand txp as providing you with a set of powerful and flexible tools, sometimes more complex “machinery” in the form of plugins, with which to build your site as you want rather than as “a kit of prefabricated modules” cms. On the one hand, you will only get so far without getting your hands dirty with txp-tags, on the other you don’t have learn a programming language. In that sense txp is in my view a more “serious tool” than many modularised bolt-together functionality CMSs.
The down-side is that it is not as immediately accessible as to novices, though you are right that here there is still room for improvement.
Your recommendations are good, but frankly whether that will all happen is doubtful. As the templates are all a community effort, keeping past material up to date is one of those unloved tasks that template authors don’t always keep up with, I guess because it’s more fun to make new stuff. With a bit of luck template 2010 will bring with it improved documentation and perhaps also better and more up-to-date templates.
Some other notes:
had to change “.html” to “.form” or “page” as appropriate in mistylook
hcg_templates/mem_templates were built as a response to the error-prone manual approach but are optional plugins, so it is completely up to the template authors to use them. Some have, some haven’t. A recommended way and recommended minimum instructions would help.
had to change “sitename” to “site_name” in both mistylook and crystalx
Textpattern does have a mechanism for auto-updating tags that have changed between versions (thankfully this does not happen all too often) but this happens when upgrading from one version to the next. Installing a template bypasses that. This is in the setup folder that one removes after installation but I guess there would be an argument for making the “clean up old tags” part of it available separately as a plugin.
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