Textpattern CMS support forum
You are not logged in. Register | Login | Help
- Topics: Active | Unanswered
Pages: 1
Are article-less sections viable?
I have a new site that I’m building for launch next year. Most of the sections will be constructed from page+form scaffolds with some link furniture (ETA: and a few will have article_custom tags with articles from other sections). There is no need to for any articles in those sections. There are sections with articles. The articles will be assigned to perhaps 20% of the total number of sections, and around 80% of sections will be article-less.
I can use the keyboard to type in the first few characters of the item in the dropdown (in a similar way to me typing ‘Uni’ to get to United Kingdom in a dropdown list rather than scrolling forever).
From a UX perspective, there’s a lot of scrolling to find the assigned section. Removing the article-less sections from the dropdown would make this process cleaner & clearer, and reduce the risk for human error. Providing a toggle / radio in the sections settings to appropriate users would accomplish this, and could have side effects of simplifying the writing process for junior staffers…fewer moving parts, less chance of something going wrong in the publishing workflow.
Last edited by gaekwad (2025-11-24 11:02:31)
Offline
Re: Are article-less sections viable?
Two ideas: bot_wtc allows you to hide specific sections in the section drop-down. You specify them individually per site. That would be an option that works now, if not quite as automatically.
Or you could make a plugin that replaces the current section drop-down but with fewer sections. The docs show an example for modifying a panel element. In your case you’d be using article_ui › section for your callback and would provide an alternative for section_popup that also determines which sections have no articles and then unsets those sections from the list in the dropdown in the same way as the current function unsets the default section.
Something to bear in mind: if I’m not mistaken, article-less sections in general won’t be searchable if there is no article content to search.
TXP Builders – finely-crafted code, design and txp
Offline
Re: Are article-less sections viable?
Why so many Sections? Is there any way to intercept the URL and take action that way, without needing to create physical sections?
Otherwise, you can alter the section drop-down with a tiny plugin as Jools says, or use bot_wtc.
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
Offline
Re: Are article-less sections viable?
jakob wrote #341346:
Two ideas: bot_wtc allows you to hide specific sections in the section drop-down. You specify them individually per site. That would be an option that works now, if not quite as automatically.
That hits the mark – thanks!
Something to bear in mind: if I’m not mistaken, article-less sections in general won’t be searchable if there is no article content to search.
Yes, this was a moving part in my decisions to date – the article-less sections will essentially be landing pages for now, with a potential (50:50 chance) they might have articles in the future, but that’s for a v2 or v3 and I’m consciously trying to not prematurely optimise so I can actually launch the damn thing to schedule.
Bloke wrote #341347:
Why so many Sections? Is there any way to intercept the URL and take action that way, without needing to create physical sections?
I’m sure there’s a way to intercept and route, but having spent a proportionally longer-than-typical amount of time on content strategy, the more straightforward the presentation layer the better.
Offline
Pages: 1