Index Pages in Textpattern
Java Tutorials are the big draw here at Take the First Step. The easy way to build my new tutorial landing pages would have been via a Textpattern category. But I wanted too much control over both the content and the presentation to go that route. My method was to:
- Create a section dedicated to focus pages. I elected to keep my focus posts off the front page and out of my syndication feeds – YMMV.
- Hand roll each summary page as a focus section post. This allowed me to simply copy my existing focus pages (implemented as tables, text paragraphs, and definition lists) into Textpattern.
- Control presentation with a focus template page. My focus template is very similar to my main template – I simply tweaked my Surrounding Articles plugin so that I could optionally limit the article list to a specific section.
- Clean urls with some htaccess magic. Because I have a small number of focus pages, I map focus/java, focus/cms, and focus/weblog to index.php?id=NNNN (where NNNN is the appropriate id number for each focus page).
It was a bit more work, but I’m pretty happy with the result. It doesn’t really scale, but I only expect small numbers (only three at present).