Textpattern 2
Right. We’ve cliked on the admin button and logged in. So what is the first thing that greets our eyes? The admin screen of course.
The WP admin screen. Many of you will be familiar with this. You enter admin via the Write screen as indicated by the dark highlighting on the Write tab. You can see all the various tabs in a single row which will take you to the different sections of admin where you may find other option tabs. There’s also a logout tab on the right and next to that is a View Site tab. Beneath is the textbox area where you will write your posts. On the right you can see the Categories title with all the categories you have created listed beneath it. There will only be 1 category initially until you create some of your own. Along the top of the textbox are the Quicktabs which allow you to quickly insert HTML tabs into your post. Oddly what is lacking here is Textile help. Considering WP comes pre-packaged with 2 Textile plugins you would think some help would be standard within admin even if you haven’t decided to use either of them.
Beneath the textbox area is the tick-box for Pingback and the URL box for Trackback. I haven’t found Trackback at all in TXP yet and Pingback is limited to certain URLs. Then you have the save options of Draft, Private or Publish. There is a 4th button for Advanced Editing which takes you to a second screen which gives you added options to allow/disallow comments and pings, add a password for the post, create an excerpt and edit the timestamp. There’s an option to add custom fields but I have to say that in all honesty I never new what the hell this was for. Right at the bottom of the screen is a Preview area but it doesn’t work until you’ve saved the post. Is that stupid or what? Not much of a preview if you’ve already published. It might be useful if you are saving your post as a draft but otherwise totally pointless. You usually end up at the Advanced Editing screen when you want to edit an existing post or comment though you can set an option to use this screen all the time.
The TXP admin screen looks somewhat different. There are 2 rows of tabs along the top. The top row selects the main areas of Content, Presentation and Admin. As you select one of these the second row of tabs will change. There is a 4th tab at the top for View Site. The Logout button in TXP is always at the bottom of the page. As you look at the graphic the content tab is white indicating that it is selected and in the 2nd row the write tab is white so we are looking at the write area just as we were with WP. One major difference in TXP is that this is the only screen for posting and editing. I’ve used a screenshot of my live site so that you can see some items better.
In the center we have the text area for writing posts or editing posts and comments and immediately underneath is a text area for creating excerpts. On the right is a column of options. Normally at the top you will see a Pre and a Next button which allows you to move backwards or forwards through your existing posts or comments. They aren’t showing in the screenshot because there isn’t a post or comment selected in the text area. Then you have 4 selectors to determine how you want to save your work. Next are 2 drop-down boxes for categories. You can only attach 2 categories to a post and only the first one will show on-screen, so not as many as you can add with WP but I never had any use for more than 2 anyway. That’s just me though. I know a few out there who regularly use several. Next you get a drop-down box to select a section. This is something WP does not have at all and is one of the reasons I prefer TXP. This is what allows me to put all my static pages with menus into TXP but I will deal with it in more detail later. Normally for blogging purposes this would be set to article. Under that are a couple of check-boxes to turn comments on or off for this post and the Invitation box. This contains the words you want to use on your page which visitors click on to make a comment. Then you have the timestamp with a little check-box to reset the time for a post. At the bottom of the column is the Save button.
Over on the left is Textile Help which pops up a little menu with the more commonly used textile shortcuts. At the bottom of the popup is a more button which takes you to the Textile site for more detailed help. Under that is the Advanced Options button where you can determine if Textile is used for articles and excerpts or not, overide the form so you can post a single article on a page instead of a list, add an image for the article a bit like the mood-images you can use in WP with the appropriate plugin and specify the title used in the URL link for the post instead of the standard generated one. There’s also a little text area where you can define Keywords which allow relationships between different posts.
Under all of this you can see a list of existing posts, which in my case stretches to 7 pages already. Simply clicking on the relevant post will bring it up into the main text area for editing.
Now that we’re back to the main text area here’s where I think TXP scores over WP again. Down the right-hand edge of the box you can see 3 tabs. The top one, TEXT is white indicating it is selected and this is where you do your normal writing or editing. Under that is HTML which will show you your post in HTML format allowing you to make adjustments to the presentation. At the bottom is PREVIEW which is live, no plugin necessary. It’s ideal for checking exactly how your post will look on your page when it is published. Make a few alterations and click PREVIEW again to see how they look and all before you click the Save button.
So there you have it. Your write options in both TXP and WP. In my next article I shall take a look at what you get when you do what most people do first when they’ve installed – click on the View Site button.