erraticwisdom

Part 2: The Textpattern Engine

This article is about the Textpattern CMS itself and what you should know about it. The Wikipedia Article covers its basic history if you’re interested; otherwise, let’s get started.

The file structure is fairly simple. Areas seen by the public are in the root directory while the engine itself is found in the “textpattern” directory.

You will most likely not have to edit anything, because almost anything can be accomplished through the variety of tags or plugins available. However, if you do find the need to hack your site into perfection, it’s good to know where the important files are.

Obviously, anything related to comments is found in the “publish/comment.php” file. This also include the code for the comment form if you would like to fix up the tabindex. This is also the place to go if you want to wrap your comments in a div or otherwise modify the commenting system.

Another important file handles all of the tags used within the CMS and can be found at “publish/taghandlers.php”. You would only have to modify anything in this file if the tags output or function is not exactly what you’re looking for. For example, on my home page, I modified the <txp:comments_invite /> tag such that the invite text and count would be contained in the anchor. The file is very well commented and you can find the particular tag handler you’re looking for by searching for the name (ex. I searched for “comments_invite” in the example above).

Obviously, you might make some modifications to the root “index.php” in order to have an effect on all pages produced. Some people add their statistics code in this file for example.

Update: I neglected to mention an important aspect of Textpattern, it’s language file. The language information controls almost all of the actual words outputted by the CMS ranging from error messages to administrator-side text. Actually, in recent versions, it has lost it’s “file” status and has been integrated in the main database. It is helpful to know how to modify this if you want to personalize your site; for example, if you wanted to change the default “Thank you” response for comments, you would do a search (in PHPMyAdmin or similar) in the “txp_lang” table of your database for the text and replace it with whatever you want.

That’s pretty much it for the Textpattern Engine. If I missed something or would like me to elaborate on a specific part, leave a comment below.