Finals Week
Today was the official end of classes, but the real work has just begun. Beginning tomorrow (yes, on a Saturday), I will scarcely sleep as I finish papers and prepare for my final exams. I actually shouldn’t even be taking this much valuable time because I have a painful Biology Lab Practical bright and early tomorrow morning, but I figured that I should at least let you know since things might be a little quiet over the next week. For some reason, I decided that well over twenty credit hours was a reasonable load and I am beginning to pay the price.
Nevertheless, I am very excited about what has happened so far in my college career and what is coming up. I will be starting a wonderful new job working for my university’s web design team this month and have a very exciting course schedule for next semester including PHI465 – Ancient Philosophy, which should inspire some interesting articles.
Again, I apologize in advance for not posting this week, but I will still be around the comments and in the forum if you need me.
Textpattern Pages
I will be leaving this entry in the series largely open because it will likely be covered more thoroughly in Nathan’s article.
Textpattern pages are the basic template for your site. They are displayed based on sections and control the layout of your site. Accompanying page templates are your CSS styles which can also be regulated by sections.
I’ve often heard praise of Wordpress’ easy templating system, but I’ve used both and have found Textpattern’s to be much simpler. The tags have an intuitive XML-style structure and can be easily generated from a more descriptive popup. Also, direct form outputs can be used to emulate PHP includes so you don’t have to modify each page template.
Designing a website for Textpattern is very simple. Simply follow your normal process and then it is only a few minutes process to attach your template to the CMS. Obviously, some details will have to be tweaked within the forms but that is the topic of my next article.
Textpattern Sections
Textpattern Sections are by far the most misused aspect of Textpattern and I am often guilty of employing them when they are entirely unnecessary. Textpattern sections are strong content and presentation dividers and are powerful enough to create different blogs or websites from the same installation.
Separate sections should only be used if you are trying to:
- Create “static” pages – Tutorial
- Create different “blogs” with entirely different layouts and styles
- Manage archives
Sections should not be used solely for content division; there are categories for that purpose as well as other external tagging services.
Sponsoring Charity
This article was originally titled “Chitika for Charity”, but due to some auditing complications, I’ve decided to change to the Yahoo! Publisher Network for now. I only had Chitika eMiniMalls (that is not an affiliate link because, frankly, I wouldn’t recommend them) running for a single day during the month of October, but on that day, six clicks were audited to two, and the revenue for the day went down by over 80%.
Obviously, a single day is not fair treatment, but I actually have over a month of Chitika under my belt and I will be waiting until the audited revenue for November is released before I decide on anything. There is an excellent article at Work Boxers about this as well as some other discouraging aspects about Chitika.
Now, to get back into what I meant to say. A discussion about ads following my recent redesign got me thinking about whether or not I should keep them running. The hosting costs for this site with Dreamhost are fairly low and I just got a wonderful new job, so the money isn’t really the point of this website. However, since the site is making money, why not keep the ads running and give the money to someone who needs it more than I do?
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.