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#25 2020-01-17 21:22:56

bici
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From: vancouver
Registered: 2004-02-24
Posts: 2,086
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Re: Required fields on Sections pane

Blank pages produce kinda ‘hidden’ sections/articles that can be used as ‘parts’ of other articles. Think of book chapters or multilingual articles etc.

that is interesting! Would it still be easy to mange where one has many chapters?
Also how does one spilt up the Chapter where one may have many Sections and Sub-Sections? i.e. how deep can one split-up the chapter?


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#26 2020-01-17 21:47:06

Bloke
Developer
From: Leeds, UK
Registered: 2006-01-29
Posts: 11,399
Website GitHub

Re: Required fields on Sections pane

bici wrote #321201:

Would it still be easy to mange where one has many chapters?

There’s no hierarchy as such. If you were publishing a book chapter by chapter, you may actually want each chapter to have its own URL for searchability and to be able to serialise it or to let people jump to a particular chapter.

But if you wanted to write it in chapters (where one chapter = one article) but only have a single entry point for visitors, you could thread all the chapters together from there into a single document and have them not have individually-addressable URLs. If so, this feature is for you.

To set this up, you could make example.org/books/book-title a regular article. In its Body text you might then ‘chain’ the chapters together:

<txp:article_custom section="chapters" limit="99">
   <txp:title />
   <txp:body />
</txp:article_custom>

Done. One big article. All your chapters streamed together. If you had a whole load of different books and chapters in that section, you might segregate them by category. Perhaps the category matches the book title (the article url-title in this case):

<txp:variable name="book_name"><txp:article_url_title /></txp:variable>
<txp:article_custom section="chapters" category='<txp:variable name="book_name" />' limit="99">
   <txp:title />
   <txp:body />
</txp:article_custom>

Boom, done.

The upshot is that you can string together all related chapters (articles) into one long document but only present a single endpoint to users. If you typed ‘example.org/chapters/chapter-1’ for example, you’d get a 404. Anything in the ‘chapters’ section is unaddressable as Txp can’t render anything if there’s no page attached to it. You can only pull content into other articles / forms / pages from “pageless sections” via <txp:article_custom> or URL skulduggery (see Oleg’s example below).

That’s not the only application. You can store bio text or event / venue details or contact information in pageless sections and call that content into your regular articles when you need it. Think of pageless sections as silos of includeable information, much like Forms are to Pages. But the crucial thing is that you can give editors responsibility for this content’s upkeep instead of having to write the snippets in either: a) regular articles that have URLs you wish to not be directly accessible, or b) Forms that not all content editors are given access.

Does that help at all?

Last edited by Bloke (2020-01-17 21:54:18)


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#27 2020-01-17 21:52:30

etc
Developer
Registered: 2010-11-11
Posts: 5,128
Website GitHub

Re: Required fields on Sections pane

bici wrote #321201:

that is interesting! Would it still be easy to mange where one has many chapters?
Also how does one spilt up the Chapter where one may have many Sections and Sub-Sections? i.e. how deep can one split-up the chapter?

Pageless sections/articles are just not directly accessible via their URL and hidden (by default) from txp section/article tags. As usual with txp, there is no rigid inbuilt ‘hierarchy’ functionality. Rather, you have the full freedom to attach them to some ‘parent’ article via, say, a custom field and output their content within their parent.

I’ve ‘written’ a three-chapters test book and a multilingual article to illustrate the concept. The construction is quite simple, yield if interested.

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#28 2020-01-17 22:05:02

etc
Developer
Registered: 2010-11-11
Posts: 5,128
Website GitHub

Re: Required fields on Sections pane

Bloke wrote #321204:

But the crucial thing is that you can give editors responsibility for this content’s upkeep instead of having to write the snippets in either: a) regular articles that have URLs you wish to not be directly accessible, or b) Forms that not all content editors are given access.

c) Pageless sections/articles can be made searchable via the standard txp q query. You’ll have, however, tweak the search results form to point their URL to their parent.

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#29 2020-01-18 05:18:34

colak
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From: Cyprus
Registered: 2004-11-20
Posts: 9,057
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Re: Required fields on Sections pane

etc wrote #321206:

I’ve ‘written’ a three-chapters test book and a multilingual article to illustrate the concept. The construction is quite simple, yield if interested.

that is really cool!!!


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#30 2020-01-18 07:14:54

phiw13
Plugin Author
From: Japan
Registered: 2004-02-27
Posts: 3,134
Website

Re: Required fields on Sections pane

etc wrote #321206:

I’ve ‘written’ a three-chapters test book and a multilingual article to illustrate the concept.

That multi-lingual article is quite cool.

The construction is quite simple, yield if interested.

Me waves ~


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#31 2020-01-18 11:46:19

etc
Developer
Registered: 2010-11-11
Posts: 5,128
Website GitHub

Re: Required fields on Sections pane

phiw13 wrote #321215:

That multi-lingual article is quite cool.

Me waves ~

The construction is possible since ages, you just don’t need to care about hiding page-less articles/sections any more.

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