The Hickensian

A few more Textpattern odds and sods.

Finishing off the hacks to the comments.php file in Textpattern (see also TXP notes 3)textpattern-notes-part-3 is the introduction of a small feature from MovableType that I miss. When receiving email notifications of comments, they always had the relevant entry URL in them. You see the comment and want to reply, so just click the link to go straight there.

Here’s how to do this in TXP. In publish/comment.php find this line near the end (should be line 374 if you haven’t already hacked it):

<pre> $out = "Dear $RealName,\r\n\r\nA comment on your post on your post \"$Title\" was recorded. </pre>

Change it to this:
<pre> $out = "A comment on your post \"$Title\" (http://www.sitename.com/blog/$parentid/ ) was recorded. </pre>

Just change the URL to suit your site, and the parentid will add the relevant id into the URL. Incidentally, if you’re upgrading textpattern to the latest RC, and you’ve installed these hacks, then you just need to change 1 line of code in order to keep your customised version.

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Integrating Textpattern with Photostack was another goal. I wanted to keep all my ‘include files’ (footer, navigation etc.) as forms within Textpattern, as this makes life so much easier. However, I also want to insert these in pages outside of Textpattern. To do this, open up the index.php file in Photostack, and change the small chunk of php to read:

<pre><?php // include Textpattern first include '/full/path/to/textpattern/config.php'; include $txpcfg['txpath'].'/publish.php'; ob_start('parse'); // Then pull in the photostack.php program. include("photostack.php"); // Load photostack. load('config.php'); ?> </pre>

And then all your Textpattern tags, such as <txp:output_form="header"> will parsed. This also works for static pages.

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One of the shortcomings of Textpattern that I mentioned previously, no control over the XHTML output in permalink tags, has been solved by this excellent plugin by Zem. It allows attributes such as class and title to be specified. Nice.

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Finally, I’ve only recently discovered what ‘override form’ in content>write>advanced options can be used for. I now have 2 forms for using with entries, a default one which only displays an excerpt on the main journal page (for long entries), and another which displays the full entry (for very short entries). I can then choose to override the default when posting or editing an entry for instance, when the entry is short. If the option to override form isn’t visible (under ‘Advanced Options’), the you may need to open up textpattern/lib/admin-config.php and change the ‘allow_form_override’ to equal 1.