TOPIC: PHP FRAMEWORKS
Investigating Textpattern
9th March 2009With the profusion of Content Management Systems out there, open source and otherwise, my curiosity has been aroused for a while now. In fact, Automattic's aspirations for WordPress (the engine powering this blog) now seem to go beyond blogging and include wider CMS-style usage. Though some may even have put the thing to those kinds of uses, I believe that it has a way to go before it can put itself on a par with the likes of Drupal and Joomla!.
Speaking of Drupal, I decided to give it a go a while back and came away with the impression that it's a platform for an entire website. At the time, I was attracted by the idea of having one part of a website on Drupal and another using WordPress, but the complexity of the CSS in the Drupal template thwarted my efforts and I desisted. The heavy connection between template and back end cut down on the level of flexibility too. Though that mix of different platforms might seem odd in architectural terms, my main website also had a custom PHP/MySQL-driven photo gallery too and migrating everything into Drupal wasn't going to be something that I was planning. Since I might have been trying to get Drupal to perform a role for which it was never meant, I am not holding its non-fulfillment of my requirements against it. While Drupal may have changed since I last looked at it, I decided to give an alternative a go regardless.
Towards the end of last year, I began to look at Textpattern (otherwise known as Txp) in the same vein, and it worked well enough after a little effort that I was able to replace what was once a visitor dossier with a set of travel jottings. In some respects, Though Textpattern might feel less polished when you start to compare it with alternatives like WordPress or Drupal, the inherent flexibility of its design leaves a positive impression. In short, I was happy to see that it allowed me to achieve what I wanted to do.
If I recall correctly, Textpattern's default configuration is that of a blog, which means that it can be used for that purpose. So, I got in some content and started to morph the thing into what I had in mind. Because my ideas weren't entirely developed, some of that was going on while I went about bending Txp to my will. Most of that involved tinkering in the Presentation part of the Txp interface, though. It differs from WordPress in that the design information like (X)HTML templates and CSS are stored in the database rather than in the file system à la WP. Txp also has its own tag language called Textile and, though it contains conditional tags, I find that encasing PHP in <txp:php></txp:php> tags is a more succinct way of doing things; only pure PHP code can be used in this way and not a mixture of such in <?php ?> tags and (X)HTML. A look at the tool's documentation together with a perusal of Apress' Textpattern Solutions got me going in this new world (it was thus for me, anyway). The mainstay of the template system is the Page, while each Section can use a different Page. Each Page can share components and, in Txp, these get called Forms. These are included in a Page using Textile tags of the form <txp:output_form form="form1" />. Style information is edited in another section and you can have several style sheets too.
The Txp Presentation system is made up of Sections, Pages, Forms and Styles. The first of these might appear in the wrong place when being under the Content tab would seem more appropriate but the ability to attach different page templates to different sections places their configuration where you find it in Textpattern and the ability to show or hide sections might have something to do with it too. As it happens, I have used the same template for all bar the front page of the site and got it to display single or multiple articles as appropriate using the Category system. Though it may be a hack, it appears to work well in practice. Being able to make a page template work in the way that you require really offers a considerable amount of flexibility; it allowed me to go with one sidebar rather than two as found in the default set up.
Txp also has the facility to add plugins (look in the Admin section of the UI) and this is very different from WordPress in that installation involves the loading of an encoded text file, probably for the sake of maintaining the security and integrity of your installation. I added the navigation facility for my sidebar and breadcrumb links in this manner, with back end stuff like Tiny MCE editor and Akismet coming as plugins too. While there may not be as many of these for Textpattern, the ones that I found were enough to fulfil my needs. If there are plugin configuration pages in the administration interface, you will find these under the Extensions tab.
To get the content in, I went with the more laborious copy, paste and amend route. Given that I was coming from the plain PHP/XHTML way of doing things, the import functionality was never going to do much for me with its focus on Movable Type, WordPress, Blogger and b2. The fact that you only import content into a particular section may displease some, too. Peculiarly, there is no easy facility for performing a Textpattern to Textpattern migration apart from doing a MySQL database copy. While some alternatives to this were suggested, none seemed to work as well as the basic MySQL route. Tiny MCE made editing easier once I went and turned off Textile processing of the article text. This was done on a case by case basis because I didn't want to have to deal with any unintended consequences arising from turning it off at a global level.
While on the subject of content, this is also the part of the interface where you manage files and graphics along with administering things like comments, categories and links (like a blog roll on WordPress). Of these, it is the comment or link facilities that I don't use, allowing me to turn comments off in the Txp preferences. So far, I am using categories to bundle together similar articles for appearance on the same page, while also getting to use the image and file management side of things as time goes on.
All in all, it seems to work well, even if I wouldn't recommend it to the sort of audience to whom WordPress might be geared. My reason for saying that is because it is a technical tool that is used best if you are prepared to your hands dirtier from code cutting than other alternatives. I, for one, don't mind that at all because working in that manner might actually suit me. Nevertheless, not all users of the system need to have the same level of knowledge or access; usefully, it is possible to set up users with different permissions to limit their exposure to the innards of the administration. In line with Textpattern's being a publishing tool, you get roles such as Publisher (administrator in other platforms), Managing Editor, Copy Editor, Staff Writer, Freelancer, Designer and None. Those names may mean more to others, but I have yet to check out what those access levels entail because I use it on a single user basis.
Txp may lack certain features, such as graphical visitor statistics instead of the current text listings. While, its administration interface could benefit from refinement, it fulfils my core requirements. The more streamlined approach makes it more practical in my opinion, which is demonstrated by my creation of A Wanderer's Miscellany. Consider exploring it yourself to see what's possible, since I am certain that I have only scratched the surface of Textpattern's capabilities.
What about a book on WordPress development?
7th October 2007Here's something that I would really appreciate: a book on code cutting for WordPress customisation and extensions. Having the Codex is all very fine, but having a dead tree compendium that you can peruse at your leisure is a definite bonus. If there was a way to get the Codex on PDF and print it all off for easier reading, that would be progress. Though I believe that a publisher did plan to bring to the market something like what I want, the author and publisher parted company, a pity. It would be great to see something like Apress' Pro Drupal Development for WordPress. What about it, Automattic folks?
FCKeditor and Drupal
24th March 2007My Drupal investigation is currently in hiatus, but I did get to exploring the world of modules and adding to the standard ones supplied. Drupal doesn't have a WYSIWYG editor supplied in the standard package, so I went and added one that I have used elsewhere: FCKEditor. Setting wasn't much of a problem until I encountered the following error: Unknown element of UniversalKey panel. The solution to the problem is to remove the reference to UniversalKey from the configuration file fckeditor.config.js. Since it took a spot of finding, here it is for posterity and so that I'll find again...
HTML Tidy for Windows
22nd March 2007Drupal has modules (Import HTML and its helper Static HTML together make up one option) for importing static (X)HTML pages into its database, and it needs HTML Tidy to work. Since I am playing with the thing on Windows, I went out and snagged the version for that OS. Being either lazy or bloody-minded, I tried an XHTML page with PHP code embedded in it and, needless to say, the thing choked. I must try it with plain XHTML instead.
Open source CMS options
18th March 2007After reading an article in the latest issue of PC Plus, I got curious about the world of content management systems again. I went over to OpenSourceCMS to sample the CMS demos that they have got on there. Mambo and Joomla! (I wish they dropped that exclamation mark; it messes up automated grammar checking) are fully fledged CMS’s and look impressive too, though how they would fit into my online presence is something of an open question. Since I spied that PHP-Nuke uses themes, that is an attraction; I am already used to that mindset thanks to WordPress. While Drupal is seemingly less slick than the others, that could be an attraction in itself; it does offer themes but no rich text editing is available.
Though all of the above are built on top of PHP/MySQL, I ignored them for some reason when I last looked at open-source content management systems. That does seem a strange thing to do, but this was a while ago and the moderate cost of adding database functionality to my website was not something that I was willing to pay, though I have done so since for HennessyBlog.
Therefore, I ended up seeing what Plone (built on Zope and using the Python programming language) could do. What I was had in mind at the time was a replacement for Perl-powered photo gallery, and a CMS was never going to fit the bill; it still doesn’t. In any case, Plone left me with the impression that it was an all or nothing affair when I like coexistence of website components on a single server. Things may have changed since then, so giving it another go remains an option.
Now that I have decided to have a look at Drupal, the emphasis this time is not on using it as a photo gallery platform; if I wanted that, I’d go with the API for something like Flickr or Zooomr. This time, the emphasis on using a CMS to manage the visitor information directories on my website. It does coexist with the other website components, including WordPress and the aforementioned bespoke built photo gallery. Interestingly, Drupal does offer blogging functionality if I wanted it.
Set up involved a spot of work with MySQL before moving onto other things:
mysql -u adminuserid -p /* logging in*/
create database drupal; /*creating new database*/
grant ALL on drupal.* to adminuser identified by “**********”; /* granting access to new database */
quit; /* exiting */
Because it is easier to see what’s going on (not wrong, hopefully), I prefer command line working with MySQL. For some reason, Drupal comes only in tar.gz archives, so I extracted this into the web server directory and opened up the site in Firefox. Installation only requires the set-up of database access and is soon completed. A few things turned up in the status report that needed attention: cron, this can be run manually; activation of PHP Unicode and GD library (PHP’s gd_info function is a real help in testing this) extensions, editing of php.ini to remove commenting semicolons activated them and restarting Apache made them available; having a place to store uploads, the directory called files got created.
Since then, I have set about bending it to my will, not always an easy thing to do with software. The first thing to do was to give it a static home page. By default, Drupal places tasters for any nominated pages and stories on its home page and shows configuration instructions until you allow some content to filter through. However, adding the Front Page module allows you to override this behaviour and have something more static. It was an entry on Kehan’s Blog that set me heading in the right direction.
The next steps were to persuade the thing to allow external links to exist in menus (though patches exist, I have yet to learn how to apply them other than finding the nefarious piece of code and replacing, a considerable challenge that makes me wonder if there is not a better way to do it: with a module, perhaps?) and carry on the theme editing until it ties in with the rest of my site. Then, I’ll make the decision whether to replace my current workflow (Perl-powered pre-processing of XML into PHP/XHTML using XSLT and the Saxon parser followed by FTP upload to the web server) with this one. The automation of the former argues in its favour. We’ll see how things pan out…