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Re: Textpattern's face to the public
giz wrote #340327:
I must be an overly sensitive petal then, as I read etc’s post as another designer jab from ‘senior management’, following on the heels of an earlier one.
I took it as etc asking if we should consider restrictions on the designer role within Textpattern, which has a fair amount of granularity compared with the other roles. At present (edit: according to the linked table at the time of writing), a Designer in Textpattern parlance has full control over images & articles…whereas a Freelancer doesn’t. Does that mean a Designer can make a Freelancer’s Draft article Live? I haven’t tested it, but the table implies that’s the case. There could be a situation where that’s not ideal – for example a Copy Editor may want final say, and the Designer may just be focussed on the scaffold, fixtures & fittings of the site rather than the article content.
Last edited by gaekwad (2025-08-28 20:04:50)
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Re: Textpattern's face to the public
etc wrote #340328:
behind-the-scenes developing on the live site in dev preview mode.
Absolutely. This is a perfect situation where dev/live lane splits make sense. It’s what the feature is designed for. As long as the usual caveats are taken into consideration (plugins and prefs are global) and people are careful to operate on the correct theme, no ill can befall the live site while the dev lane is in force.
It’s one of Textpattern’s most amazing assets.
Once the design is singing nicely in a dev lane, we can easily export the theme, and commit the filesystem changes as a back-port to GitHub.
Last edited by Bloke (2025-08-28 19:53:04)
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Re: Textpattern's face to the public
gaekwad wrote #340329:
Does that mean a Designer can make a Freelancer’s Draft article Live? I haven’t tested it, but the table implies that’s the case.
Maybe. The privs are sometimes a bit nebulous and open to weirdness like this.
If we can clamp stuff down by default without losing too much open functionality, it benefits the overall stability of a website and its user workflows.
The question mark is over what happens if someone turns off dev lane ability in prefs. How do privs react?
Last edited by Bloke (2025-08-28 19:51:52)
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Re: Textpattern's face to the public
gaekwad wrote #340329:
At present, a Designer in Textpattern parlance has full control over images & articles…whereas a Freelancer doesn’t. Does that mean a Designer can make a Freelancer’s Draft article Live?
In theory, a Designer can create a draft article, but not alter others articles, so the answer is no. Designers area is pages, forms etc.
Bloke wrote #340331:
The question mark is over what happens if someone turns off dev lane ability in prefs. How do privs react?
If memory serves, it is a per user pref, the dev ability of other users is not affected.
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Re: Textpattern's face to the public
etc wrote #340332:
In theory, a Designer can create a draft article, but not alter others articles, so the answer is no. Designers area is pages, forms etc.
That makes sense — thank you. I’ll update the docs to reflect that and hope Jekyll doesn’t explode in a fireball.
Last edited by gaekwad (2025-08-28 20:03:45)
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Re: Textpattern's face to the public
etc wrote #340332:
If memory serves, it is a per user pref, the dev ability of other users is not affected.
Is it? Okay. Guess it doesn’t matter. But hypothetically:
page 1,2,3, 6
skin.preview 1,2, 6
skin.publish 1,2,3What would happen if a designer user turned off their ability to skin preview, via prefs, and they make a change to an asset? It’s effectively “published” but the skin.publish priv (if implemented) would forbid that.
So, do they lose the ability to Save any assets if they’re not using dev lanes? Or is the skin.publish priv ignored if dev preview is off and thus designers can bypass the inability to publish changes by “promoting” themselves (toggling the pref)?
Last edited by Bloke (2025-08-28 20:31:00)
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Re: Textpattern's face to the public
Bloke wrote #340335:
What would happen if a
designeruser turned off their ability to skin preview, via prefs, and they make a change to an asset?
Currently, nothing prevents him from changing anything. Live/dev lanes are sections features, they do not depend on users dev preview ability. If a section is set (by someone) to use ThemeA as live and ThemeB as dev, any (logged in) user with dev preview enabled (whatever role) will see ThemeB. If his dev preview is disabled, he will see ThemeA, but it does not prevent him from modifying ThemeB.
So, do they lose the ability to Save any assets if they’re not using dev lanes?
No, independently of their dev preview status, Designers would only lose the ability to alter themes in use as well as change sections live theme. All allowed modifications would stay behind the scene.
Looks too complex for 4.9, but if we can fine-tune user roles in txp5, that’s an option.
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Re: Textpattern's face to the public
etc wrote #340336:
If a section is set (by someone) to use
ThemeAas live andThemeBas dev, any (logged in) user with dev preview enabled (whatever role) will seeThemeB. If his dev preview is disabled, he will seeThemeA, but it does not prevent him from modifyingThemeB.
Good point. I got mixed up between the preview just switching off the viewing and the multi-edit ability to push changes live.
I agree it’s not easily solvable in 4.x.
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Re: Textpattern's face to the public
In my Development Notes the “give me the keys to textpattern.com” point erroneously assumed that we would be using the ‘dev’ branch (it’s a feature I use constantly).
That said, forum members should be able to view the latest design revision without being logged in, let alone developers the ability to check under the hood.
Staging a html copy of the homepage on a separate domain (or foo.textpattern.com) achieves this, and allow developers to do their bit before we even start on a ‘2025’ dev theme in textpattern.com/textpattern/.
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Re: Textpattern's face to the public
giz wrote #340338:
forum members should be able to view the latest design revision without being logged in, let alone developers the ability to check under the hood.
Staging a html copy of the homepage on a separate domain (or foo.textpattern.com) achieves this, and allow developers to do their bit before we even start on a ‘2025’ dev theme in textpattern.com/textpattern/.
That’s a valid point, but html copy works only up to some point. To fully test the design (search, plugins integration etc) we’d need to integrate it into some txp instance, as close as possible to textpattern.com setup.
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Re: Textpattern's face to the public
etc wrote #340348:
That’s a valid point, but html copy works only up to some point. To fully test the design (search, plugins integration etc) we’d need to integrate it into some txp instance, as close as possible to textpattern.com setup.
Agreed; the html version has already served its purpose (quickly establishing the requirements of the banner / menu system). As soon as I move onto the ‘yellow panel’, the page will be hybrid of html and <txp:article /> forms until the markup and css is mostly there i.e. sketch design completion.
From there I’ll prepare a full prototype with all the gubbins (I’ll need a clone of the database for this step). This is also when I’ll prepare commits for general perusal.
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