textpattern basics

As promised in my article moving to textpattern I’m going to go over some code and concepts used on this site. This site is run using textpattern, currently I’m on version 4.0.3; if this changes you can see the version at the bottom of this page. I’ll start my series of articles by going over some textpattern basics and linking out to some great resources. Hopefully you will find this tutorial helpful!

Resources

Basics

Okay lets start with the basics. Textpattern is a CMS, its much more than a simple blog! It uses a bunch of different concepts and methodologies to organize information and create web-pages. Textpattern allows you to enter and store, text (articles), images, files and links. It also allows you to create and manage your website presentation using styles, pages, forms and sections. Each piece of content(articles, images files and links) can be associated to a category. All of these things together allow you to create a very robust website, and if the out of the box tools aren’t good enough, you can always use plugins! For this article, I’ll focus in on Sections and Categories.

Textpattern uses two major organizational structures to move store and organize textual information. These two structures are Sections and Article Categories. For the rest of this article, I’ll refer to Article Categories as Categories.

In my opinion Sections are a key part of textpattern organization. Sections are used to “section” off articles from other articles. These sections basically create big holding tanks that articles are placed into. When browsing a section such as my www.ryanbarr.com/portfolio textpattern basically limits the <txp:article/> tag to only articles that are in that section. This is a really important concept; so let me phrase it another way. When browsing a section, textpattern attempts to limit the information presented to articles that are in that section. As a side note you can show content from another section if you want to by using a tag like <txp:article_custom /> or some other really cool plugins.

Categories on the other hand allow you to categorize your information. Categories have nothing to do with sections. Any article can be placed in any category So for example, on this site if you go to the investing category page you will see all of the articles that are in the investing category. It doesn’t matter what section these articles are in, only the category matters. This allows you to have any information that is related, no matter want section it is in placed together.

The basic difference between categories and sections is pretty important and needs to be understood (in my opinion) to really get a good handle of textpattern. Hopefully this makes sense, if not, drop me a few comments and I’ll try to clear it up! Next time I’ll dive into Sections a little deeper and start to discuss Page forms.