Textpattern Solutions (She Lives!)
The first fruit of my labor has arrived in the form of Textpattern Solutions, the first and so far only tome regarding the magic and wonderment of Textpattern, the CMS of choice for brilliant designers everywhere.
Freshly unboxed, my sample copies glow with the luminescent TXP yellow, and the pages crackle with the knowledge of some of the smartest cats in the community. Rob Sable (super-genius developer known for his series of rss plugins), Nathan Smith (maestro and mastermind behind Godbit), Cody Lindley (all around development ninja), and Mary Fredborg (lead TXP developer goddess) have all put their blood, sweat and tears into a book that is a true value to any TXP user.
Textpattern Solutions is overflowing with detail. Every author drilled down into considerable nuance about their topics, from installation guidelines to the structure of the system to the considerable tag reference at the end. Some highlights:
- Chapter 2 covers local installations on both PC and Mac, so you can test and tweak away without compromising live environments.
- Chapter 4 gives a nice overview of Textile, and throws in some little ditties that I didn’t even know (like writing multi-paragraph block quotes — who knew?).
- Chapter 11 covers some cool stuff like custom error pages, building a search field and designing the results, plus creating complete, unique metadata for each page.
- Chapter 14 (available to download) covers writing plugins, which is beyond me, but cool as hell that Rob is sharing his experience with the world.
- The case studies are great. Nathan discusses creating a multi-author blog, Rob covers creating an e-commerce site with Textpattern, and Cody describes building boisecityeats.com, which relies on heavy use of custom fields and plugins.
This book goes way beyond the forums and free resource sites. It’s a definitive guide that describes in ample detail (the book itself is over 500 pages, a huge value) the basics of installation to the most advanced levels of customization. It will answer all your questions and more.
Comments.
Shane
- wrote the following on Tuesday May 29, 2007
Robin
- wrote the following on Saturday June 2, 2007
Brad
- wrote the following on Tuesday June 5, 2007
Shopper
- wrote the following on Thursday June 7, 2007
