erraticwisdom

Part 5: Textpattern Content

This is perhaps the easiest part of Textpattern to learn and understand because it is very similar to other systems.

The Content area of the administration panel is divided into seven sections:

Organise: This area lets you create and modify categories for all content types including articles, images, files and links.

Write: This is where you will create and post your entries. There is a main content field and excerpt field to enter your post. By default, both are set to use Textile formatting, but you can change this under “Advanced Options”.

The Advanced Options are very useful, they let you control the details of every article including custom fields. In later versions of Textpattern, custom fields can be created from within the administration panel under “Admin > Advanced Preferences”. For example, I have created some custom fields to include the download ID and Demo Path for my templates section. Also, the Advanced Options lets you specify the URL title of the article.

You can also control the categories and section of each article as well as the Comments Invitation that will be displayed by the <txp:comments_invite /> tag in your article form.

Articles: This area is an archive of your posts. You can search as well as sort them to find what you are looking for.

Images: Allows you to upload and specify information (alt attribute, etc) for your images. I typically only use this for in-article images that are not likely to change. My template images go elsewhere so that I can have more control over them (I don’t want them to be renamed to 1.gif, 2.png, etc).

Files: Allows you to upload and track the number of downloads for your files.

Links: This content area can let you create a more stable link list such as blogroll, or it can be used to create a frequently updated link blog. These can be outputted based on a “links” form to have more control over their format.

Comments: Allows you to delete and edit comments as well as ban an IP address associated with a particular comment.

That’s about it for the Textpattern content, if I missed something, let me know.