Content Strategy Forum

Destry · 2015-08-27 14:10:43

I haven’t mentioned it here before, but CSF is a Txp site, built by Kevin Potts and I and hosted on Kaizen Garden.

It’s a community site based on a conference history that began in 2010. Read the About info if you’re curious.

Kevin doesn’t have interest in Github, I don’t think, but I’ve decided to put the code on Github for a number of reasons:

It’s a great way to keep a versioned repo of the code, which we don’t have right now, and Kaizen Garden’s status right now always makes me nervous. If we ever have to move, this is a nice safeguard. (We just need to keep the database dump and config files elsewhere.)
I’d like to use the CSF site as an educational platform for people learning how to build publishing architecture with Textpattern (at least one case example), and that would turn into a number of new articles for CSF and .com, probably, or even the mag.
It’s a great way to get help with code, notably by designers/developers from the Textpattern community, when we have issues.
By the same reasoning, it’s a great way to get hands-on dev assistance with extension projects CSF has hanging in the wind, such as a discussion forum, an interactive templates index, etc.

CSF community is mostly writers, editors, strategist, content marketers, and people knowledgeable of tech, but not hands-on with code, so it’s impossible to get contributors from that community to help with some of our development initiatives. Thus the latter couple of items above. I’d be happy to have that help from this community, and use the site as an educational platform in exchange.

So in addition to putting the files on Github, I’d also figure out a way to talk about the publishing architecture there and make the various templates available too, particularly the pages and forms where most of the code would be, but otherwise not accessible.

I just need to make sure certain things in code are not shared, like Analytics IDs and whatever.

Any ideas on that are welcome, but I guess the first step is to get something over to Github.

A question on that… I’d prefer to put this under a CSF account on Github as an “organisation”, rather than under my own. But we have no money and I’m not paying out of pocket for that. Anybody know if I can still create an org account? I think things like teams would be useful in the future when different objectives are underway.

maverick · 2015-08-27 14:47:27

Destry wrote #294394:

I’d prefer to put this under a CSF account on Github as an “organisation”, rather than under my own. But we have no money and I’m not paying out of pocket for that.

Under your account, there is a drop down at the top right (right-ish) side. You can create a new organization. You will need an email, but you can select the free repo option. You will also be able to select other members to add to your organization. Your account will automatically be added.

Last edited by maverick (2015-08-27 14:48:44)

Destry · 2015-08-27 18:09:15

Thanks, Maverick!

So far so good.

Last edited by Destry (2015-08-28 00:56:27)

Destry · 2015-09-04 09:06:51

Getting ready to move the site to Github, and want to run something by y’all first…

CSF isn’t yet setup like the hip kids do it; putting pages and styles on the server instead of the DB. Right now everything is in the DB. It’s just been easier for us because we don’t have a lot of time, and I’m the only one that uses Github (and only recently feeling more comfortable with it). But I want to make those pieces available too, as well as all the forms, so as an interim solution, in addition to the server files, I might have three more folders on Github like this (underscores so they sit at top of tree away from regular install material):

_csf-forms (excluding forms that inject third-party data; e.g, Google Analytics)
_csf-pages
_csf-styles

Some instructions will be made available, of course, to say what the folders are.

Since I want the suite to be a learning resource that someone could rebuild, I probably need to show preference settings and the list of installed plugins too, right? Maybe these would just be a page each with the relevant lists (and values in the case of settings). Links could be provided to the plugins:

_csf-forms
_csf-pages
_csf-styles
_csf-plugins.textile
_csf-settings.textile

Things that won’t be put on Github are:

/textpattern/config.php
(other?)

And install tree folders that have CSF content will be empty:

/files
/images
…

Only the website architecture built with Textpattern is for public use, not CSF’s brand or content (no dump file will be available, for example). But the brand files will go on Github too. I don’t want them used, but it’s not like people can’t find/see the files online anyway. Which makes me think a statement about how to use everything might be necessary — a license, or whatever.

Am I overlooking anything? General comments? Suggestions?

maniqui · 2015-09-04 12:49:57

Hi Destry,
nice project (both the CSF itself and this particular project of sharing what’s under the website’s hood).

I’d suggest you to add to .gitignore:

textpattern/tmp/*
files/
images/
.htaccess
# You can provide an .htaccess.sample

Which makes me think a statement about how to use everything might be necessary — a license, or whatever.

I’m an strong believer that everything that’s put in the public goes automatically into the public domain. These days, licenses look like boilerplate to me, although I like the “undoing copyright” power of copyleft licenses. But this is for another discussion.

As you ask for suggestions, I’d suggest you to move as soon as possible to flat files for pages and forms. With rah_flat, you can have flat files even for configuring sections and site preferences. Not having to manually copy your forms and pages to your _csf-* folders… will make your life easier

Destry · 2015-09-07 13:01:13

Hi Maniqui! Thanks.

maniqui wrote #294519:

I’d suggest you to add to .gitignore: textpattern/tmp/*...

I’m not familiar with .gitignore. I’ll have to research it.

… move as soon as possible to flat files for pages and forms. With rah_flat, you can have flat files even for configuring sections and site preferences. Not having to manually copy your forms and pages to your _csf-* folders… will make your life easier

Point taken. I’ll have to research that too. I’ve not done it before. The real problem is I don’t have a lot of time right now, but I’ll look into it eventually.

You’re in the CSF community, right? You want a Publisher account on the site? I could use an extra pair of hands for the architecture stuff. No pressure. No answer will be taken as, “no thank you”. ;)

I’m an strong believer that everything that’s put in the public goes automatically into the public domain.

I think you’ll have to clarify what you mean by “in the public domain”. You mean has the right to use as they want?

I don’t care about the markup, CSS, JavaScript, and whatever, because that’s the whole point of sharing the site, but the visual identity isn’t something we want people mimicking, notably the custom graphics that signify the brand (logo, map links, bars, banner graphic, etc). It’s not supposed to be taken as a free blog theme. People will have to insert their own brand graphics if they really want to copy the code to that level of exactness. I mean who would want to anyway outside of being a learning tool?

Copying the brand of another site for your own production site is a petty lame thing to do, and especially if one is trying to profit from it. Licenses — call it a friendly statement, if you want — make it clear the brand part is off limits, legally speaking. At least that’s how I see it.

Last edited by Destry (2015-09-07 13:07:47)

maniqui · 2015-09-07 14:09:30

You are welcome.

Destry wrote #294534:

I’m not familiar with .gitignore. I’ll have to research it.

It’s just a plain text file that can be located in the root folder of your project (or even in subfolders), to tell Git what to ignore. That is, what not to include on commits. So, it helps to avoid committing files with sensible data (like config.php).
In the case of ignoring textpattern/tmp, the goal is to avoid committing existing temporary files that no-one would need when setting up their own copy of the website.

Point taken. I’ll have to research that too. I’ve not done it before. The real problem is I don’t have a lot of time right now, but I’ll look into it eventually.

I can help you to set up rah_flat.

You’re in the CSF community, right? You want a Publisher account on the site? I could use an extra pair of hands for the architecture stuff. No pressure. No answer will be taken as, “no thank you”. ;)

I’m not sure if “I am in the CSF community”, although I’m subscribed to its newsletter. I’m also in the Google Groups for Content Strategy (mostly as a lurker although I’ve participated in some conversations too).
Feel free to add me as a Publisher.

I think you’ll have to clarify what you mean by “in the public domain”. You mean has the right to use as they want?
(…) People will have to insert their own brand graphics if they really want to copy the code to that level of exactness. I mean who would want to anyway outside of being a learning tool?

Copying the brand of another site for your own production site is a petty lame thing to do, and especially if one is trying to profit from it. Licenses — call it a friendly statement, if you want — make it clear the brand part is off limits, legally speaking. At least that’s how I see it.

I understand your concernings, but I’d question that someone would have any real motivation to copy the CSF brand with the goal of deceiting some audience.
BTW,. I’m pretty influenced (or, let’s say, convinced) by the cultural liberty arguments on these topics

Destry · 2015-09-07 16:42:52

maniqui wrote #294535:

I’m not sure if “I am in the CSF community”

You take an interest in CS, follow the newsletter (first letter coming soon, btw), and are in the G+ community. That qualifies you. ;)

Great! Your site credential are forthcoming, and I’ll be adding you to the Github team too.

I understand your concernings, but I’d question that someone would have any real motivation to copy the CSF brand with the goal of deceiving some audience.

I’d like to think not too.

Destry · 2015-09-27 09:16:00

The CSF website is currently down because the web host (Kaizen Garden) has pulled anchor and sailed (or sunk). Kaizen was sponsoring the CSF site.

The site is not personal or commercial, it’s an open community site for educational purposes. I’m looking for a new sponsor to host the site, in exchange for advertising the sponsor in return, and perhaps some documentation.

The host must be a certified business, not somebody’s home server, or whatever. If anyone knows a web host that would be hospitable to this sort of thing, reach me through the forum email.

Destry · 2015-09-29 10:39:41

What would be the appropriate license choice for putting the CSF website on GitHub, publicly?

CSF content uses a creative commons license, with the exception of contributed articles, which authors hold rights to. But that’s not really the focus, which is more the templates and publishing architecture we’ve built. Do we need to respect Txp core licensing, in this case?

wet · 2015-09-29 11:53:37

Destry wrote #295192:

Do we need to respect Txp core licensing, in this case?

No, with the exception of plugins which would have to obey the GPL.

Destry · 2015-09-29 14:32:00

Thanks.

Destry · 2016-01-21 18:56:02

For those new and experienced, young and old… See what you think of our collaborative resource offer; i.e., read the ReadMe file. ;)

We don’t know if it’s much of an offer, really, more like an experiment, but it if helps anyone learn some aspect of Txp architecture, then it’s been worthwhile on that side of things.

We have a lot of other directional things we’re wrangling at the moment, such as getting GatherContent and CAT accounts setup for our team, working with CSForum 2016 organizer (Melbourne this time, btw), and some other non-website related things, but we’ll have a few more website iterations to start issuing soon, in case anyone wants to follow along there.

We also expect to make a number of changes with subsequent releases of Txp too, of course.

jakob · 2016-01-21 22:59:05

Destry wrote #297530:

For those new and experienced, young and old… See what you think of our collaborative resource offer; i.e., read the ReadMe file. ;)

We don’t know if it’s much of an offer, really, more like an experiment, but it if helps anyone learn some aspect of Txp architecture, then it’s been worthwhile on that side of things.

Very gracious of you (and Kevin and Julián) to do that. It’s always interesting to see how seasoned pros go about structuring their projects and I’m always surprised, intrigued and heartened that there are so many different ways of going about it. I’ll certainly come back and study it in more detail.

Another useful resource in the same vein is the templates on the textpattern github account for the homepage and your txpmag. I’ve learnt a lot from Phil’s and Jukka’s ideas and strategies.

(From the readme) Instructions are forthcoming, in the form of published article, that describe how the website was converted from a database-driven system to a dynamic, flat-file hybrid with a repository on GitHub

Do you mean rah_flat for templates or do you also have a way of publishing content from flat files?

I’m familiar with the former but I’d be particularly interested in ways of doing the latter, as I’m in the process of culling legacy content from several sites that use an older proprietary CMS that I have no publisher access to.

Currently I’m using a combination of:

Sitesucker, a website crawler, to download the sites to local files
Data Extractor to extract selected parts of the source code
Some text massaging of the resulting CSV file it produces, and then split in the terminal to break that data out into individual files
pandoc in the terminal to convert between textile and word (or markdown)
editing by the content authors
convert back to textile using pandoc (pandoc will now do fairly good docx<->textile conversions for simple text formatting (analogue to this markdown example, and you can do a whole folder at a time).
either cut and paste into textpattern or reintegrating back into a csv for importing into the textpattern database. This is where a flat-file content insertion method would be great.

I can’t help thinking there has to be a better way, but it is at least less laborious than going through each page individually using copy and paste, and the resulting textile is pretty clean.

Destry · 2016-01-22 11:04:15

jakob wrote #297532:

It’s always interesting to see how seasoned pros go about structuring their projects

Julián, Kevin, and I certainly qualify as Txp “veterans”, but that doesn’t mean anything in my case, and only Julián is a qualified GitHub user. We’re all still learning as we go. But as for the CSF site architecture, it’s an old Txp install from 2010 that’s been converted from a single blog to what it is now and revamped a couple of times. And that’s how it will always be: a rolling project, improving things here and there as we go. I would say it’s value is more for new users of Textpattern than experts, but maybe that will change with time as we gradually roll improvements into it.

We aren’t the only ones behind CSF, however, there are others focused on different aspects of CSF operations, but those of us in the GitHub org do represent the “web/tech” team (among other hats). We’ll also be launching a discussion boards project soon, and then an interactive literature bibliography database, which will be fun to work on. Those will be public repos too, and the biblio system is expected to be Txp, but I’m not positive yet. When new custom fields are done that will be helpful, but I’m not sure we can wait that long. It might be a good opportunity to try ProcessWire on that one.

Another useful resource in the same vein is the templates on the textpattern github account for the homepage and your txpmag. I’ve learnt a lot from Phil’s and Jukka’s ideas and strategies.

Yes, I keep a blank install of the Txp master repo locally. I use that to help with my documentation effort. And like you say, pick up a trick or two.

TXP Mag needs some love. I’d prefer to see Phil and gang open that up to community for improvement like we’re doing with CSF, to facilitate progress (and that means design as much as architecture). I appreciate the idea of using .com’s blog as a community publishing channel, but due to the scarcity of human resources at that end of things, I’m not convinced the editorial workflow there is sufficient to be the right place, in fact. Plus authors need to have their names on feature length articles in a proper way, with profile pages, etc, which requires giving them “freelancer” accounts. It just makes more sense to direct that to the mag where it’s already setup. But… then there’s the lack of article contributions.

I’ve actually coaxed Julián into writing his first ever full-length article that will describe in layman’s terms how to setup a rah_flat publishing architecture based on the CSF design, but the emphasis is more on using GitHub than Txp, per se, because the article is aimed on content people of any variety, not just Txp users. Part of the aim is to help content people recognize GitHub as a collaborative editing platform, but I’m writing a complimentary article for emphasizes that angle, while Julián’s will be focused on the mechanics of CSF’s own site.

Nevertheless, we’re struggling a bit with whether his should be published at CSF or in this community somewhere. The article can be written/edited to lean it either way, but because of the tech in question (Textpattern), I can easily see it being suitable for this community, and, as mentioned, it’s longform nature is better suited as an article for the magazine rather than the Txp blog. But, again, the magazine is in a defunct state. We’ll probably go with CSF as we’ll appreciate the juice. ;)

Oh, there’s an idea for some of those Txp donations sitting there unused — give contributing magazine authors a token of appreciation for each article they write (25 EU spondoolics?). (We’re having to face the same situation with CSF.)

Do you mean rah_flat for templates or do you also have a way of publishing content from flat files? I’m familiar with the former but I’d be particularly interested in ways of doing the latter…

Yes, and “hybrid” is just my own lack of understanding, perhaps, but I was reading an article about flat-file systems a while back, which really argued the difference between what is truly flat-file and what is CMS/flat-file setup. They didn’t say hybrid in the article, but it struck me as a convenient way to describe the result of rah_flat to non Txp users.

Remember, this repo isn’t just for Txp users, but anyone, from the CSF community or elsewhere, who might have the desire/courage to try their hand at something. ;)

Currently I’m using a combination of [five things]…

I can’t help thinking there has to be a better way, but it is at least less laborious than going through each page individually using copy and paste, and the resulting textile is pretty clean.

Cool. When we have some time we’ll check that stuff out. Whatever we do, I want it to be simpler, not more complex or reliant on too many other things. We don’t want to be bleeding edge to the point content crossover people won’t bother giving it a second look.

Last edited by Destry (2016-01-22 11:35:21)

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#1 2015-08-27 14:10:43