My Textpattern setup and plugins

As I’ve been approaching the first anniversary of my web site, I thought it would be helpful to those of you thinking about creating a similar site to explain how I went about creating danboe.net. I’ve benefited from a lot of others who’ve come before me, and I’ve looked at several different solutions over the last year. My current implementation seems to fit my needs quite well, so I thought I’d take some time this afternoon and walk through my setup for the good of the order.

This article begins a short series of articles where I intend to explain exactly how everything is all set up over here at danboe.net.

Textpattern, my CMS

I use a content management system called Textpattern, and I’m currently running version 1.0rc3. It’s a PHP/MySQL based implementation that I have hosted at TextDrive.

Some lessons I’ve learned the hard way

The last year has seen my share of hiccups as I’ve moved into this whole manage my own site affair. One thing I’ve encountered is the site serving empty content. This has happened twice, due to the following reasons:

• Changing the MySQL password
• Having an XML prolog in a form or page template.

Speaking of changing MySQL passwords, remember that the MySQL password specified in your config.php needs to map to the MySQL password.

Textpattern plugins I use

Textpattern is a pretty extensible product, and you can run a site right out of the default installation. I tend to be a bit of a tinkerer at heart, and over the last several months, I’ve added various plugins behind the virtual curtain that cloaks my implementation from your browser. The plugins I use can be found on my about page.

What follows are some edits I’ve made at the time of this writing.

glx_code 0.3

Note: I made a few modifications to this plugin in order for it to better meet my needs. Specifically, I revised the code so that it adds a title attribute to the <ol> tag with the value of “Code sample”. Additionally, I revised the implementation so that it does not recognize pound signs as comments, since I have a tendency to use this plugin with CSS code samples, where the pound sign is used as a selector to identified elements. Obviously, I don’t wish for such selectors to be reflected as commented. Finally, I tweaked the code so that a .txt file extension is not required, since I have a tendency to use code samples that are .xml, .html, .css, .js, etc.

Note: As I continue this series of articles, I’ll point you to my TextPattern templates (pages and forms), and in these you’ll see exactly how I make use of these plugins. So if you’re new to Textpattern and you want to use my site as a tutorial, it’s best to install these plugins in your Textpattern installation. If you copy my templates without having these plugins installed, you won’t get the same result.

Next post (newer)

My Textpattern sections and page templates

Previous post (older)

A better approach for code samples?