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#13 2020-07-16 11:01:30

gaekwad
Server grease monkey
From: People's Republic of Cornwall
Registered: 2005-11-19
Posts: 4,137
GitHub

Re: Curating forum posts

Also, for all our sanity, it would be super amazing and great if we could use the time after 4.8.2 drops for more eyes on docs from more people. Destry went way above and beyond last winter and things have been fairly quiet since.

Clearly we have smart people here, what can we do to harness the smartness? Is it just a matter of finding interested people and then co-ordinating, or am I missing something obvious?

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#14 2020-07-16 11:28:41

Bloke
Developer
From: Leeds, UK
Registered: 2006-01-29
Posts: 11,270
Website GitHub

Re: Curating forum posts

I’ve put together some words recently, including some plugin stuff. And the installation/upgrade guides are pretty good now. We have at least one new admin callback to document after 4.8.2. Themes doc needs tweaking.

The main areas we need help are in writing a task-oriented admin guide. e.g. To do such-and-such, ensure pref xyz is on, and then do this, this and that. I expect a lot of this can be cadged and updated from the ‘individual panel docs’ that we have lurking around, then we can finally delete those and redirect.

The key here is to construct a single doc or segment that covers common admin-side concepts such as searching for stuff, sorting tables by clicking column headings, filtering out columns that aren’t currently the sort focus, pagination, multi-edit, and so forth. That can then be referenced from topic sections and saves repeating ourselves. Saves a lot of unnecessary wording in each topic.

Specific tasks can then be constructed that encompass these key elements inside the docs.textpattern.com/build/content-types doc. Things like:

  • Writing and publishing an article (which incorporates draft status, default publishing status, default section, custom fields and their creation, locating articles to edit, yahde yahde).
  • Categorising content and what it does for site visitors. This includes how to manage category trees.
  • Adding an image to an article (which incorporates the Images panel and possible mention of com_article_image as an enhanced workflow).
  • Creating lists of links.
  • Managing and using files.
  • Handling comments, spam, comment prefs, and how to wire them up for acceptance and display on articles (which touches on Forms in the next doc).

That covers the ‘content types’ doc in our new landing page.

Similarly, we need the docs.textpattern.com/build/site-structures doc that covers how to:

  • Create sections that mimic your intended content structure.
  • Build pages to support that, encouraging reuse.
  • Use forms to offload repetitive tasks (touch on shortcodes, perhaps with link to the shortcode examples).
  • What override forms mean in terms of diverting processing on an ad-hoc basis (this is also mentioned from the content doc in terms of how to use them).
  • Use styles to govern look and feel, and reuse across sections.
  • Mention themes, and link to the themes doc that Destry wrote.

One of the things putting me off doing the tags, btw, is the level of repetition due to limitations of GitHub’s Liquid implementation. I’d love to write some templates like I’ve done for the global tags and common presentational tags. Something we can just throw content at to render attribute lists and genealogy and examples and things like that, instead of typing the structures by hand each time.

It’d be great to have each tag doc as just a collection of variables that set up the content, and then these get thrown at templates to render. If you look at the work I’ve started in the section_list tag, for example, you’ll see that the entire common attributes and global attributes sections are rendered like this:

{% include atts-common.html break="" breakby="" %}
{% include atts-global.html class="tag name or unset" %}

That’s it. You can see that we include just two common attributes and of course the entire global set, customising the value of the ‘class’ attribute with something that isn’t the default. I’d like to do the same kind of thing with all attributes to cut down on repetition, plus template out the search results better. I think GitHub Liquid can do the former, so we might be able to make some inroads into that, but definitely not the latter as I’ve tried it and failed (plus the following 16 commits from that point where I was testing it).

The global/common atts needs rolling out to all tag docs, removing any of the manually-written attributes that coincide with those. And I figure while doing that we might as well write a template to govern an individual attribute. Something that takes arguments like name/value (or value set as an array), a description of each value, plus the default.

I’m hoping if we move to locally-hosted docs that we’ll have more control over this and can add support for a better Liquid engine.

Last edited by Bloke (2020-07-16 11:47:10)


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#15 2020-07-16 15:51:51

colak
Admin
From: Cyprus
Registered: 2004-11-20
Posts: 9,011
Website GitHub Mastodon Twitter

Re: Curating forum posts

I think that we should prompt people to be adding their examples to txp.tips. I have done that a few times but there were no submissions as far as I know.


Yiannis
——————————
NeMe | hblack.art | EMAP | A Sea change | Toolkit of Care
I do my best editing after I click on the submit button.

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#16 2020-07-16 16:11:17

michaelkpate
Moderator
From: Avon Park, FL
Registered: 2004-02-24
Posts: 1,379
Website GitHub Mastodon

Re: Curating forum posts

colak wrote #324592:

I think that we should prompt people to be adding their examples to txp.tips. I have done that a few times but there were no submissions as far as I know.

I apologize for being a terrible person who hoards knowledge through sheer laziness.

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#17 2020-07-16 17:03:04

colak
Admin
From: Cyprus
Registered: 2004-11-20
Posts: 9,011
Website GitHub Mastodon Twitter

Re: Curating forum posts

michaelkpate wrote #324595:

I apologize for being a terrible person who hoards knowledge through sheer laziness.

Hi Michael,

I wasn’t referring to you, I have made a number of requests here as I felt that the tips site should rejuvenate and become the main resource for such examples. Unlike the documentation site, which in my view should just include basic native tag examples, the tips site is the one which could include more involved solutions.


Yiannis
——————————
NeMe | hblack.art | EMAP | A Sea change | Toolkit of Care
I do my best editing after I click on the submit button.

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#18 2020-07-16 17:18:43

jakob
Admin
From: Germany
Registered: 2005-01-20
Posts: 4,595
Website

Re: Curating forum posts

colak wrote #324596:

I felt that the tips site should rejuvenate and become the main resource for such examples. Unlike the documentation site, which in my view should just include basic native tag examples, the tips site is the one which could include more involved solutions.

I agree. The txptips site is actually already largely rejuvenated with some last fixes to do. I‘m away this week and have a heavy workload until end of July but in August I‘ll finish it off. If you already have tips pls send them and I can add them.


TXP Builders – finely-crafted code, design and txp

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#19 2020-07-16 19:55:15

etc
Developer
Registered: 2010-11-11
Posts: 5,053
Website GitHub

Re: Curating forum posts

colak wrote #324596:

Unlike the documentation site, which in my view should just include basic native tag examples, the tips site is the one which could include more involved solutions.

Imo, it depends on the nature of the problem. Shuffle content is a rather particular demand, but sorting categories by “children” articles posting date is quite natural.

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#20 2020-07-18 22:21:17

Destry
Member
From: Haut-Rhin
Registered: 2004-08-04
Posts: 4,909
Website

Re: Curating forum posts

gaekwad wrote #324574:

more eyes on docs from more people.

The forum docs flagging idea Bloke raised seems like a good start here. Could lead to other kinds of contributions if it helps make clear what those contributions need to be.

Destry went way above and beyond last winter and things have been fairly quiet since.

I had the spare time, then the confinement thing disrupted the routines at chez wion. I’ll pick up a couple lose threads again soon, but not to the level I was, which wasn’t maintainable. I’d still like to see index2 become index but a couple more things to iron out yet, I guess.

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