Textpattern portfolio templates

Indeed, the back-end is like a theme development studio, where you can work on many themes simultaneously, for employing on your website or sharing with the community. Theoretically speaking, you could hack a theme package together, from scratch and by hand, directly on your web server. The metadata is simple, and the files are text-based. And, sure, it can be a learning experience to sit on the cold garage floor with grease and gears. This document, however, describes the sensible approach of using the new theming functionality in the back-end to ensure everything is organized and aligned correctly.

If not, you can freely modify the assets of any theme without worry. In addition to the document you are reading, and your own installation of the software, the following resources make for handy references to default system conditions in case you go astray, or in the event you do not have an installation of your own yet, in fact.

Make note of these:. The front-end and back-end demos are routinely updated. The back-end demo offers a choice between the current version release and the next one under development.

If you intend to create themes to share with the community, you must register and use an author prefix. Your chosen prefix must not already be taken, as indicated by the prefix lists. Having and using a personal prefix ensures no two themes will ever be created with the same name , thus tripping Textpattern up. While prefixes are the same whether you create themes or develop plugins, the naming convention is different in each case to make it clear at a glance what product a name is representing.

Basically, theme names use hyphens, and plugin names use underscores. If your prefix is abc , for example, your theme names would look like this:. To ensure a theme imported into your installation does not break your front-end, Textpattern augments imported themes with any missing assets needed by the default system, and provides empty placeholders where non-essential assets are missing. Textpattern will always augment a theme this way when importing or updating one, and any of the default package assets are missing.

In other words, you would be sharing a worthless theme, just like the one shared with you. Their installation of Textpattern would augment the theme with defaults and placeholders again just like described. Definitely learn Textpattern tags! Forms are the named containers of markup components conceptually the same as partials, snippets, or includes for inclusion into page templates, or for nesting into other forms.

All form files must have unique names — across core forms and any custom forms created — and core form names will never be changed from their defaults. Compound form names use underscores between words e. Of course, you know what stylesheets are. Styles need no further explanation except to emphasize that, like pages, they must be associated to one or more sections of your website in order to rule the presentation of them.

The essential metadata rides with the package as a manifest. Either way, a title will always be present in a manifest file, but it is better if you create a custom value rather than rely on Textpattern to generate one for you.

The txp-type and its associated value is a constant; it must always exist and never change. The remaining four items reflect more optional metadata fields, which nevertheless should be filled in when the data is known.

If skipped, Textpattern will provide default values for the version and author items at time of theme creation; so these values will pass with an imported theme if not changed by the author. Textpattern has always allowed you to create a different presentation for your website by merely editing the default stylesheet, or using one or more static files on your web server.

But with the inclusion of themes functionality, you can make and collect many theme packages that can be:. Now we descend the ladder and get closer to the action! As long as you are using the latest release of the software, at least, it will make sense. Any exceptions to this rule are made clear in context of instructions. See the Create from scratch section for more about these fields. To establish one or more additional themes, you either need to create them, discussed in the next sections, or import them from an external source.

A single, important preference is associated with themes development. As the help tip for that preference says, when this is active, and it is by default, users with sufficient privileges [initially Publisher and Designer roles] can safely develop and preview a new theme while all other users will still see the old theme until the new one is deployed. The rest of this documentation assumes this setting. See more about the active behaviour of this preference in the Preview theme presentation section.

The with-selected controls are a long-time and important functionality in Textpattern. Users of Textpattern are familiar with these; a combination of checkboxes on table records that work in relation to a selection menu where options can be selected and applied to checked items.

Several new selection options are available for Themes functionality between the Themes and Sections panels. Each is described in other sections of this document in context of use.

If you need to create or edit website sections before setting up a development project, now is a good time. Do this in the Sections panel, as normal. To create a new section, use the New section button to open the section editor and create one from scratch. In both cases, the section editor will open. The theme assignment made in the section editor will apply as the live theme assignment, even if you assign what is otherwise a development theme.

Be aware of that. If you do not want the assets of an intended development theme to be live, do not assign a development theme in this location. Development set up means walking through a series of actions to establish a working themes development environment.

The birds-eye view of the development set up process is:. Once the above three steps are completed, you are ready to proceed with HTML and Textpattern tag development in pages and forms, and likewise with CSS in styles, but not before. Whatever option you choose, you want to be smart and think ahead. Think about your final front-end presentation ambitions and how many different themes or assets that will require to achieve. Then pick the path that saves you the least amount of work to establish the initial development environment.

But if you expect to need multiple themes and a mix of assets across them for a wild website design, you might be better off duplicating an existing theme first. You could then add to those assets where anything you need is missing or needing renamed. Then you could duplicate this newly augmented theme having all page and style possibilities as many times as necessary to get all the themes and all the assignment possibilities you need in your final development environment.

Once the environment is established as you like, you can go back and delete the obsolete assets from each respective theme in your project leaving just the assets used in each case. It might be hard to understand now why this is helpful, but you will understand when first assigning theme assets to sections.

It can save you a lot of needless jumping around in the back end later, creating assets on the fly and getting distracted from the task at hand. Also see Different themes on different sections for more context on this useful notion. Creating a development theme from scratch is the most called-out way to get started, by evidence of the prominent New theme button at top of the Themes panel.

Using an existing theme package as a guide for your efforts is a good way to get started with making new themes. Change the metadata in the six fields as thoroughly as possible. You can always fill it in later. When finished with changing all the metadata on your duplicated theme, click the yellow Save button to save changes and close the form.

Do not click it now. The duplicated theme will be added to the themes table in the main panel view. Once the default theme is duplicated and the metadata changed, the duplicated theme is, for all practical purposes, a new theme that you will further development later.

The other way to create a theme by duplication is the most direct yet least obvious way fewer clicks in the interface. Begin by clicking the name of the default theme under the Name column of the table or using any existing theme to bring up the Edit theme editor.

Change all the metadata as described in the previous section. Do not click the Save button or you will overwrite the metadata for the source theme! You are simply taken back to the default panel view where your new theme is added to the themes table. The mere existence of a new theme in the Themes panel does not mean it is already in a development or live state.

They are in your database, yes, but just sitting their innocuous and unusable. Click this link and you are whisked off to the Sections panel in context of the theme to assign one or more of it assets to one or more existing sections.

Only one development theme can be applied to a given section at a time, but any number of themes can be applied to different sections in one-to-one relationships.

Great to see them featured, though. SLC has had and still does have some great bands that get bupkis in way of exposure. Jeff Smith » 11 January Great work with this Jared. I had something similar set up for my portfolio back when I was using MovableType on jeffsmithdesigns. Thanks for the write-up! Viking Karwur » 13 April Thanks Jared!

Jared Christensen » 13 April Viking — There is currently a step-by-step tutorial I helped write at Text Book. You can access it here. Jon M » 10 September Thanks for the great article — just one question! How do you stop the thumbnail excerpt from being wrapped in a tag? Turn off textile for the excerpt.

Hangs head in shame….. We try to avoid needless clutter within the administration panels and we strive to make the interface fully accessible for all users. The Textpattern core user interface has been localized into many languages. Of course, we always welcome further translation by the community. More translations are added all the time! Over 19 years of development has been lovingly poured into our CMS. The active, friendly and helpful community surrounding the platform ensures its continued success and guides its future.

Our CMS ships with built-in support for Textile text formatting language, and support for Markdown language via a plugin. Alternatively, you can write plain text or vanilla HTML if you so wish. User contributions are welcome and indeed, are enthusiastically encouraged. Our users continue to amaze us with their wonderful creations!