Scenarios, sections and pages

sambooth74 · 2022-09-27 20:17:17

I’m building a new theme to share with the community. It’ll be a “minimum viable theme” which uses bare semantic HTML and the browser’s default styling. I want it to be a blank canvas so you can add a couple of CSS rules and create a minimal blog or bare-bones personal site. Something like this or this. I am aiming to support all TextPattern features.

Although I’ve used TextPattern to run my personal site for around 2 years now, I still struggle to understand the overall TextPattern model. I have some questions which I think are rather basic.

Here are my proposed sections and pages:

Section	Page
default	default
articles	archive
static	static
links	links

I am struggling to understand which “scenarios” I need to cater for on each page, and I have tried to reverse-engineer this from the Four Point Eight theme. I would be grateful if somebody could check my plans and confirm my understanding.

Default

Front page (as this is never inside a section)
Search results article listing (as search is not always within a section)
Author article listing (as authors are not within sections)
Category article listing (as categories are not within sections)

Static

Single article

Links

Link listing

All advice appreciated, many thanks.

Bloke · 2022-09-27 23:47:13

Sounds like your use cases for the Default section are spot on. That’s what I use that section for, and I usually have a dedicated template just to serve it, because it differs from other pages significantly enough to warrant its own handling. But the Page only contains skeleton HTML. Since it still shares elements with other pages, I do farm most of the content out to Forms so the page blocks can be shared with…

Archive. I often call this page Regular or Blog or something like that, because it usually handles most article content, both paginated lists of articles, or individual articles from almost all sections.

Like the Default template, it draws most of its content from shared Forms that I have broken into chunks (head, css, nav, footer, teaser, hero, list_entry, etc) and the Page itself just has skeleton HTML with lots of <txp:output_form /> and <txp:article /> tag goodness to pull in the relevant blocks.

For any pages that don’t fit into the above type, I usually employ a Single page template which is very similar to the above but doesn’t have the pagination nor the list aspects. Any article in that section is displayed directly at the /section URL and is not linked to the individual article to avoid duplicate content. Handy for About and Contact pages. You have that covered with Static.

The only one of your proposed templates I don’t use is the Links page. I tend to let the Regular page handle that kind of thing and use a conditional to switch between article lists and link (or image) lists, if I find it necessary. Usually lists of other content types are just the same as lists of articles, but with a different Form to format them accordingly.

Nothing wrong with splitting them out to their own template though. If you find it easier to manage that way – and think users of your theme will benefit – then go for it.

Bloke · 2022-09-27 23:48:36

P.S. You’re in Leeds? Snap! If you want to meet up for a pint/coffee at any time, just holler.

bici · 2022-09-28 01:42:37

sambooth74 wrote #333919:

I’m building a new theme to share with the community. It’ll be a “minimum viable theme” which uses bare semantic HTML and the browser’s default styling. I want it to be a blank canvas so you can add a couple of CSS rules and create a minimal blog or bare-bones personal site. Something like this or this. I am aiming to support all TextPattern features.

looking forward to “or this”

phiw13 · 2022-09-28 06:17:56

You may want to add one (or more?) pages for error pages. There is one error_default that is build-in, but I found it a few times useful to have one for specific errors, e.g. 410 gone or 503(maintenance !). These templates contain a very minimal skeleton structure to display the required messages.

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#1 2022-09-27 20:17:17