Possible textpattern user

rmcellig · 2019-11-06 17:01:08

I was using wordpress for my personal website. I stopped after so many security issues. I am now with squarespace until I find something which is free, secure, fast, and easy to create s site.

I use html for my pages because I find it quicker and essy to use and update.

Can I use textpattern instead?

Check out my site to get a general overview. I’m looking for something that is low maintenance

Look forward to your responses!!

Take care

Randy
wwe.mcran.com

jakob · 2019-11-06 17:48:34

Hi Randy and welcome!

From a quick look around your site, it looks like it would be pretty straightforward to implement with Textpattern.

It looks to me like nearly every post is a playlist written as regular text with the date as the title and an mp3 file of the show. Some of the older posts have a pdf in place of the written playlist. The other snippets, specials and interviews follow (more or less) the same pattern from my quick look around. The player is a regular browser audio tag.

Textpattern can handle all that with aplomb. Also your url pattern with years works fine and from that one can generate archives automatically. In a textpattern setup, each show would be an article, and you’d link the mp3 to it.

As regards the other sections, like those listed by alphabetical letter, that too is possible if you are diligent about naming your filenames / file titles, and you wouldn’t need to make a page per file in those cases. If you don’t need “show notes” for those, you’d just upload the file, assign them the “snippets” or “specials” category, add the title, a mini description in the few cases where you have one and you can construct a template that outputs them automatically.

Textpattern uses textile notation by default, which means you don’t need to code your page but you get clean code output.

On the security front, Textpattern – for better or worse – doesn’t have anything like the exposure of Wordpress, so a) is mostly left alone by the hackers and b) experience has shown it to be more secure (in part because there are not huge numbers of plugins from unverified sources). It doesn’t have anything like the update frequency of Wordpress.

Two things spring to mind that you might want to consider:

You’ll probably want a host with a good, reliable speed and a generous traffic policy seeing as you have a lot of audio files. That may not be the case with a cheap-and-cheerful host. Textpattern doesn’t have high requirements, and the HTML page itself can be lightweight, so no worries on that front, but the audio files are voluminous.
You have already invested a great deal of effort putting that all into squarespace. Can you export that in some form from squarespace? There’s not an automatic importer for Textpattern from Squarespace, but if you can get your posts and files out in an orderly fashion, one of us here should be able to help you massage that data into tables you can import into textpattern so you don’t have to do a lot of retyping.

rmcellig · 2019-11-06 21:51:10

Thanks so much!! All of my audio files are on my hosting server. So that’s not an issue. I think I would just have to paste the code I have into a three column article like I currently have.

jakob · 2019-11-06 22:42:53

rmcellig wrote #319973:

All of my audio files are on my hosting server. So that’s not an issue.

Perfect!

I think I would just have to paste the code I have into a three column article like I currently have.

I suppose that is a way: make a page for each year, then update that with each new show.

But what might in the long run be a more lightweight solution for you is just to make one article per show and let the CMS do the work with making the yearly archives, changing the front page for you. That’s stuff a computer can do for you.

Essentially your weekly task (aside from the show) would be:

Create new article – in the standard setup, Textpattern shows you that window to begin with
Give it a title, e.g. show number
Set the publish date
Paste in your tracklist (you can mark this up in textile, even easier than html. See note below)
Paste in a show comment (you have that sometimes when you have a theme to a show)
Enter the URL of the mp3 file in a custom field
Save

Bam! The article’s online. The front page and year archive updates automatically. When you begin a new year, the menu adds a new link to that year on its own too.
You can also prepare a show in advance too, by setting it to “pending”. When you’re ready set it to “Live”.
If you pre-record a show but only want it to go live on broadcast date, you can set it to “Live” but with a publish date in the future. Only then does it go online.

A note about markup: Textile is even easier than using HTML. You can use a # to automatically number your tracks and it adds br tags on its own.

I don’t know how you produce / store / get your tracklist for a show. It looks a little like it’s been copied from a table.
In the standard way you have it now you’d just paste in:

# Miles Davis	Kind Of Blue	Flamenco Sketches	09.24
# Miles Davis with Charlie Parker	Ornithology	Bird Of Paradise	03.08
# Herbie Mann	Celebration	Jungle Fantasy	09.09
# Herbie Mann	Peace Pieces	Interplay	04.53
# …

That gives you the basic text like you have it now with the # auto-numbering the list.

If you wanted to differentiate artist, title, duration etc. typographically and you have your tracklist in a table in excel or similar with artist | song | album | duration in each column, you could make a little formula in excel that builds you the markup you need in the last column (it’s mostly just a CONCATENATE function in excel that chains together the columns with bits of markup sandwiched in-between). You then copy the entire last column from your excel table and paste it into the Body field of your article. Each line could be a bit like this:

# Miles Davis	*Kind Of Blue*	_Flamenco Sketches_	%09.24%
# …

which produces this output:

<li>Miles Davis	<strong>Kind Of Blue</strong>	<em>Flamenco Sketches</em>	<span>09.24</span><li>

which you can style as you like with CSS. That’s just a basic example to illustrate the principle. You could make it cleverer …

Really the only disadvantage with this approach – as far as I can see – is carrying over what you already have into Textpattern in the first place.

rmcellig · 2019-11-07 02:11:54

My playlists were taken from my gdrive using sheets. I just copied and pasted. Your advice sounds great. If I can set up a test site, I can try out the things you discussed!! 😀

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#1 2019-11-06 17:01:08

Possible textpattern user

#2 2019-11-06 17:48:34

Re: Possible textpattern user

#3 2019-11-06 21:51:10

Re: Possible textpattern user

#4 2019-11-06 22:42:53

Re: Possible textpattern user

rmcellig wrote #319973:

#5 2019-11-07 02:11:54

Re: Possible textpattern user

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