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Static Pages
I’m an old hand at Textpattern, but I’ve been away from the forums for a long time so I may have missed some easy answers to what I’m going to bring up.
I still use Textpattern but I’ve been bumping up against a big limitation of its architecture. Textpattern is great for writing simple collections of periodic content (blogs etc), but it does a suboptimal job of organizing it into anything other than a two-level hierarchy.
For example, I can assign a post to a category. But let’s say I want to assign some kind of content to the categories themselves – some meta-info or descriptions about the category etc.. By default, the best approach available is to create a section/page pair for each category. This becomes unwieldy as my sections and pages proliferate even though the designs of each don’t need to differ that much. This also erodes the benefits of content/presentation separation, because every time I create a category I need to add sections & pages to the presentation framework.
Again, I’ve been out of the loop here for a long while, so go easy on me if I missed a revolution of thought in this area, or a plugin that everyone knows about.
One approach that would ease this limitation is an easy way to create static content, separate from the Articles (since this content isn’t an Article or anything periodic) and also separate from anything on the Presentation tab. This content could be tied to a Category or simply left as a standalone piece of content. Then on the Presentation side you could choose which page template to use for these pieces of content.
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#2 2011-12-13 19:15:07
- milosevic
- Member
- From: Madrid, Spain
- Registered: 2005-09-19
- Posts: 390
Re: Static Pages
Jdueck: it not easy for explain to me in english, but I will try it: You can do everythink you want with Textpattern.
Create a section called, for instance, “meta-descriptors”. We will publish an article per category there with all the meta information you want about your categories.
For instance, if you have the category “products”, create an article titled “products” or “Our wonderfull range of products” asigned to the “meta-descriptors” section and to the category1 “products”, and explain in it everything you want about that category.
title: “Products” or a long version of the category name, such “Our wonderfull range of products”
excerpt: “Discover our incredible catalogue of products for all purpose”
body, images…..
section: meta-descriptors
category1: products
Then, you allways can recover that meta information about that category (about any category) in your templates with somethink like this, for instance, in an article template:
<txp:title/><txp:excerpt/><txp:body/>... <p>This article is filled under the <txp:category1 /> category:</p> <txp:article_custom section="meta-descriptors" category='<txp:category1 />'> <txp:title/><txp:excerpt/><txp:body/>.... any article tipical data such custom fields, images, etc... </txp:article_custom>
Last edited by milosevic (2011-12-13 19:30:20)
<txp:rocks/>
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#3 2011-12-13 19:29:50
- els
- Moderator
- From: The Netherlands
- Registered: 2004-06-06
- Posts: 7,458
Re: Static Pages
Joel, there is also this plugin.
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Re: Static Pages
Milosevic, your explanation makes perfect sense. I understand that it is possible, and that is one good solution. A big part of what I am saying, however, is that Textpattern’s architecture is suboptimal for these kinds of cases. This is due in part to the way Textpattern forces you to lump all content into one big bucket called “Articles”. Content that is not part of a periodic series should be given some space of its own.
milosevic wrote:
Jdueck: it not easy for explain to me in english, but I will try it: You can do everythink you want with Textpattern.
Create a section called, for instance, “meta-descriptors”. We will publish an article per category there with all the meta information you want about your categories.
For instance, if you have the category “products”, create an article titled “products” or “Our wonderfull range of products” asigned to the “meta-descriptors” section and to the category1 “products”, and explain in it everything you want about that category.
title: “Products” or a long version of the category name, such “Our wonderfull range of products”
excerpt: “Discover our incredible catalogue of products for all purpose”
body, images…..
section: meta-descriptors
category1: productsThen, you allways can recover that meta information about that category (about any category) in your templates with somethink like this, for instance, in an article template:
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#5 2011-12-13 20:23:07
- milosevic
- Member
- From: Madrid, Spain
- Registered: 2005-09-19
- Posts: 390
Re: Static Pages
You are right, but in my experiencie it is more a naming problem. Call it “pieces of info” instead of articles, “big groups” instead “sections”…, many times we limit uorselves because the name of the things invites us to use the technology only in a particular way. My use of sections defers a lot of when I started to work with textpattern, now I can work with sections or not, join articles by categories, subcategories, custom fields… but it’s true that that way of work requires many hours of practique in order to deeply understand the flexibility and potencial of this CMS. Textpattern is not as easy to use than it looks like in a first aproach.
Anyway, ever I try to use another CMS, I allways return to Textpattern! :-D
<txp:rocks/>
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Re: Static Pages
I have been using Textpattern since its release in 2004, and still use it. I used to subscribe to the idea that it was a matter of names as you say. But there is more at issue here: it is a deep organizational problem. We must distinguish between what is possible with the current model, and what is optimal. I am saying that it is not optimal to lump in static content with periodic content such as articles. It makes the organization of content confusing and hard to manage.
The difficulty is placed in especially sharp focus when we design a site in textpattern and hand it over to a client to manage. Suddenly the deep flexibility of the CMS becomes less of an asset when it comes at the expense of clear organization, which most clients value more.
I do think that what I am describing can be partly accomplished with plugins, and I am half considering writing them myself; but I would first like the feedback of others who have run into this general limitation.
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Re: Static Pages
Yes, I caught for the lack of description fields for authors, sections, categories, too. Authors and sections I have described by sticky articles, and categories left with headers only (categories was not so important in my case).
I doubt whether it is worth to include such rarely used features into the core, though. That specific expansion is the reason of plugins and workarounds, I think.
Another limitation of Textpattern is more frustrating for me: the same default (hidden) section for designing and styling of the quite different things: a front page, an index of category, of an author, and even search results. Although most of other CMS are designed in a similar way, too.
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Re: Static Pages
Hi Joel,
I hear what you’re saying. I agree. It’s come up a time or two over the years. The CMS has it’s own set of “semantics” but it doesn’t have an “architecture” that’s reflective of what more and more people need today beyond blogs and small sites. Yes, it can be fudged with existing semantics and plugins, and later documented for sake of conditioning a client, but it would be nice if there was more apparent structure in the backside.
What we’re really talking about here is a clear organization of content types. Content types, for those following along, are not the same as the semantics (articles, images, links, etc.) that currently define the “Content” tree of the admin-side. Following are examples of content types:
- FAQs
- book reviews,
- citations
- blog posts
- white papers
- interviews
- etc
“Static” content, for that matter is not a true content type, but you could delineate static content within a type, e.g., colophon, policies, contact, sales, etc.
You can see how things start to get a little hard to define at more granular levels, so for purposes of simplicity in Textpattern CMS you could just create a custom content type called “static” for smaller sites and dump all those non-periodic articles into it.
So how would this work in the CMS currently? No matter what, it would require a change to the semantics model, and thus no doubt to the mental models people have of the admin-side. The least disruptive would be a rethink of the Content tree and introduction of a third level within it.
This would be a good possible model for discussion for restructuring the Content panel (and sub-panels) in the admin-side. Note it requires a third-level to get the clear separation I think Joel is talking about:
Content- Components
- articles
- images
- links
- comments
- files
- Types
- “static”
- [user defined]
- [user defined]
- [user defined]
Where it says “user defined” would be whatever types are needed for a given site (examples shown in my list earlier), and a mechanism would be needed to define them.
Obviously there would be a relationship between components and types, which should probably be that each component can have multiple types, but not the other way around. Kind of like how pages can be assigned to multiple sections, but not the other way around.
For example, you could have this relationship:
Articles- static
- book citations
- reader reviews
- author headshots
- book covers
- book websites
- author homepages
- etc
You get the idea.
Yes, you can kind of do that now, but it’s a little too densely packed into single tables that require sorting and filtering, and that’s not the best UI for client users.
Is this what you’re getting at, Joel?
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Re: Static Pages
Perhaps a better, more flexible model would be to make every element on the content side – articles, categories, authors, etc – into “nodes” that can have their own text, excerpt, multiple parents and multiple children.
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Re: Static Pages
Destry Good write up. Maybe the dev team should be made aware of your white paper draft and the original question by Joel who wrote:
But let’s say I want to assign some kind of content to the categories themselves – some meta-info or descriptions about the category etc..
And yes, I also see the necessity to expand Textpattern with metadata for content types (to become a better CMS in the future).
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Re: Static Pages
Whoops looks like I missed Destry’s post while I was posting my little one.
Yes, you can kind of do that now, but it’s a little too densely packed into single tables that require sorting and filtering, and that’s not the best UI for client users.
Hmm yes I think that is a part of what I’m getting at. It isn’t possible to do static content well other than by lumping it in with periodic content.
I’m also sensitive to the need to not upset the current UI framework too much. But long-range, I don’t know if it’s possible to avoid a reboot of some kind.
I’m afraid of making the current framework too baroque…a third level of tabs? Hmm
Last edited by jdueck (2011-12-16 03:33:09)
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Re: Static Pages
Perhaps a very good first step would be a plugin that introduces the idea of “nodes”, possibly as simply another tab in the Content
Nodes would be blocks of content+extendable metadata. Nodes would glom onto the category framework but would not replace it. You would create a node, then optionally assign it one of your “categories,” which would mean it could have Articles associated with it. You could use the node’s content and metadata on category listing pages in addition to listing the articles and other nodes under that node.
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