Textpattern Semantics: A General Revelation

Matt · 2004-03-04 16:38:11

“This section has no articles of its own, it only aggregates from other sections.”

Then maybe “index” would be a more semantically sound way to name the section?

nryberg · 2004-03-04 18:09:42

Index has its own problems – my idea of an index is what you’d find at the end of a book. That’s not really a blog main page…

I do like the word aggregate, though it’s hard to come up with a term that’s easy to use. Aggregator just sounds like something you’d buy in a road-side stand in Florida.

This is an important issue, as I hardly need to tell this crowd. The whole naming scheme really makes or breaks it…

jdueck · 2004-03-06 17:27:45

In the process of updating the article….something just occured to me. The “organise” tab appears under the “content” section, when in fact it contains stuff pertaining to both Content and Presentation. Namely, Site Sections are a presentation issue whereas everything else is a content issue.

There’s two approaches to dealing with this. Either splitting the “Site Sections” function into its own tab under “Presentation”; or, making “Organise” a top-level tab like Content and Presentation. I lean toward keeping all the organisation-related stuff in one place, so I favour the second route.

Additionally, within the Organise tab, I would visually divide the functions into which hierarchy they fall into, Content or Presentation. This has already been done somewhat with whitespace added between “Site Sections” and the other three areas, but perhaps some kind of text heading and maybe color coding would help make it clear. This would let people know, not only is there a difference between the two, but exactly what that difference is.

Any thoughts?

jdueck · 2004-03-06 18:29:49

<a href=“http://www.jdueck.net/articles/textpattern.html”>Article</a> has been updated for g1.15 and general usefulness.

Changes worth mentioning:

New section on permalinks
New section on the idea of front page as its own section
Removed UI complaints that were specific to g1.14 and lower
Fixed validation and minor formatting
In the definitions list, clarified that sections are accessed via URL

I’m still trying to keep it brief. At some point I also want to add a simple explanation of the two kinds of textpattern codes, atomic and non-atomic.

Dean · 2004-03-07 16:06:32

I’m wrestling with what to do with the organise tab right now. It may indeed end up being bumped up to the first level of tabs.

Great work, Joel.

raveoli · 2004-03-07 19:52:58

By why have both Sections and Pages? The concepts behind each seems somehow similar to me…

Btw; Maybe “default” in Pages, should be called Front Page?

msinger · 2004-03-21 00:24:05

I need a few more pointers here to fully understand the most effecient and logical way to use the structural components in this program.

It seems to me Textpattern can be described as being an aggregation/presentation interface, with edit tools.

From the aggregation point of view perhaps an explanation from the bottom up i. e. the purpose of the smallest or most local component through the largest or most global component within a practical site structure would be helpful.

I don’t understatnd the relationship of ‘Form’ to ‘Article’ or ‘Page’ and I don’t understand the relationship of ‘Page’ to the sylesheet when it comes to combining static elements like navigation and logo elements with dynamic elements like articles and calendars onto the same page using the predefined style id(s) and classes.

Specifically I have a few pages already coded and referencing css stylesheet files for presentation. I want to incorporate those pages into the database have them be able to diplay additional dynamic info as well as link to new dynamic pages all managed in the same DB.

I was able to make the index.php file bring up the first of these static pages, and display it using the formatting I want by creating a Section called home and assigning a Page called home to that section. The Page is a port of my original home page xhtml. I stripped out the style sheet reference in the code and used TP to link that page with the stylesheet info.That all works and displays as expected. However I haven’t been able to figure out how to incorporate the additional static pages into TP gracefully or how to navigate to them properly.

I suspect that my initial choice to create a Section ‘home’ and a Page ‘home’ was a bad choice and is at the root of my problem.

Any suggestions would be warmly appreciated.

Last edited by msinger (2004-03-21 00:40:11)

jdueck · 2004-03-21 04:10:36

I don’t get it. Static content….there’s lots of ways. The simplest is just upload it to your site via FTP and link to it from within your textpattern pages, like any other normal static web content.

Did you read the article that is the subject of this thread? Seriously, with that and studying the example stuff that comes with Textpattern it should be at least somewhat understandable. Your questions seem to betray a very fundamental misunderstanding of how this is supposed to work, and I’m not sure exactly where to begin.

Dean · 2004-03-21 09:17:50

> I suspect that my initial choice to create a Section

andreas · 2004-03-21 09:34:19

> msinger wrote:

> I need a few more pointers here to fully understand the most effecient and logical way to use the structural components in this program.

>I don’t understatnd the relationship of ‘Form’ to ‘Article’ or ‘Page’ and I don’t understand the relationship of ‘Page’ to the sylesheet when it comes to combining static elements like navigation and logo elements with dynamic elements like articles and calendars onto the same page using the predefined style id(s) and classes.

The way I understand it, an Article is the result of a form being filled with actual content. So in the form you specify which elements to use (title, permalink, date, perhaps some additional XHTML like a div around some parts of the form etc.). What TXP put out is the article.

A page is the frame for TXP forms, tags, and hand-coded XHTML. So you can think of forms as dynamically filled containers that you can place anywhere on a page.

>Specifically I have a few pages already coded and referencing css stylesheet files for presentation. I want to incorporate those pages into the database have them be able to diplay additional dynamic info as well as link to new dynamic pages all managed in the same DB.

One way would be to create a separate section for these pages. If they are all similar, one section would be enough, if they are very different in terms of content or structure, make a separate section for each of them.

Then, you paste the XHTML of your pages in the textarea of a new page you create.

Via the “organise” tab you can tell the new section(s) which page to use and, of course, here you choose the name of your newly created page.

Like this, you have a sections being available by www.yoursite.com/sectionname/ . In case the content you already have is in some way similar and is to appear within the same page framework (that is, you have only made one new page but have different content for it) you create a new form with the structure you want, put a reference to that form in your page and just post the contents into this section.

>I was able to make the index.php file bring up the first of these static pages, and display it using the formatting I want by creating a Section called home and assigning a Page called home to that section. The Page is a port of my original home page xhtml. I stripped out the style sheet reference in the code and used TP to link that page with the stylesheet info.That all works and displays as expected. However I haven’t been able to figure out how to incorporate the additional static pages into TP gracefully or how to navigate to them properly.

>I suspect that my initial choice to create a Section ‘home’ and a Page ‘home’ was a bad choice and is at the root of my problem.

It’s not, as far as I can tell. It is exactly what you can do for the rest of your ported content as well.

As to navigation: you can get a list of sections with

<txp:section_list wraptag=“ul” break=“li” />

On the other hand, I found that for the global navigation it may be better to create a form with the relevant XHTML in it and put out that form on all the pages with

<txp:output_form form=“formname” />

Like this, there is more control over the code, e.g. I can put in additional id attributes or wrap the list in a div for styling reasons etc.

I hope this helped a bit.

msinger · 2004-03-21 20:00:15

> jdueck wrote:

> I don’t get it. Static content….there’s lots of ways. The simplest is just upload it to your site via FTP and link to it from within your textpattern pages, like any other normal static web content.

I want my client to be able to manage this entire site from within TP after it is complete, and as I said I want to be able to mix static and dynamic content on any page.

>Did you read the article that is the subject of this thread? Seriously, with that and studying the example stuff that comes with Textpattern it should be at least somewhat understandable. Your questions seem to betray a very fundamental misunderstanding of how this is supposed to work, and I’m not sure exactly where to begin.

Yes I read the article you wrote, thanks for your explanations. I’m not having trouble with the concepts and differentiation between Sections, and Categories, nor am I unfamiliar with the separation of content and presentation. I have used XML based CMS tools including Cocoon.

By the way when it comes to bombs and wedgies I understand atomic versus non-atomic, not sure what it means in the context of TP codes.

I will try again and and repost with more specific questions.
Thanks again.

jdueck · 2004-03-23 16:02:38

<i>I want my client to be able to manage this entire site from within TP after it is complete, and as I said I want to be able to mix static and dynamic content on any page.</i>

Aha, I think this is the rub right here: wanting your client to be able to manage the entire site, including static content. Of course, you and I know how to manage static content using FTP and hand-coded HTML. But this is of course too much for a client. So I see what you’re getting at, I think. I too am looking at implementing txp for a client who also wants static content.

There are two ways to do it, really. One is to create a seperate section for each page of static content. Then in the Write tab, you use that section when creating the static content. The classic example is the About page. Create a section called “about” (and a seperate page too if you want a different layout or other elements than are on the default page) and post an article under that section. This results in a page at www.georgefrankly.com/about/ that will show only that article, and can be edited within Textile/textpattern in the Write tab.

There are limits to that approach, however, and I’ve taken the tack that because static content won’t change very often, I’m going to give the client a way to post news items, for example, but information about what markets they serve – I’m going to create that by hand, upload it via FTP and have my textile pages link to it. I already offer free updates to static pages, so if they want to change it they can just email it to me. Again, this probably won’t happen very often since it’s static.

The main benefit of the former method is that site-wide layout changes can be made in one place. But again, this is something that hopefully you get right before the site goes live and don’t need to change later on.

nryberg · 2004-03-23 16:30:52

I think one of the problems that we keep bumping up against is the way that articles are organized in the content tab.

Right now, they’re just chronological, but if you’re a writer and you simply need to work on a specific area – ‘About’ for example – you don’t want to have to dig through all of the active content entries just to find the static content.

Txp is excellent for managing active content, but it’d be nice to have an easy way of pulling the rest of the site together neatly.

jdueck · 2004-04-02 15:37:56

Updated Textpattern Semantics again…

Fixed massive misspellings of “separate” – thanks to doug edmunds for pointing it out
Added links to A Better Diagram and the Tag Manual
Added “A short note on code” – clarifying the difference between form (‘atomic’) and page (‘non-atomic’) tags
Noted an exception: you can display articles from other sections using txp:article_custom

I hopefully foresee a day when textpattern documentation will be all in one place…right now we have a loose network of user-created sites and pages. Which isn’t bad, but at some point a single point of reference would be good to, like the online php manual.

Dean · 2004-04-02 15:59:31

<small>(this is me quietly whistling, looking at the ceiling)</small>

I’m going to redouble efforts on firing up the knowledgebase this weekend.

And thanks again, Joel, for your excellent ongoing work on the article.

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