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Re: Content Strategy Forum
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.
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Re: Content Strategy Forum
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.
TXP Builders – finely-crafted code, design and txp
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Re: Content Strategy Forum
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)
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Re: Content Strategy Forum
For those with projects concerned in these matters, CSF is no longer Txp-powered. In fact, after 8 long years, the project has come to an end. Voilà.
I feel like a hemisphere has lifted from my shoulders. There was so much more to it all than just a Txp website. I look forward to having a bit more time to get my own sites online and start writing again, which is my primary objective going into 2018.
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