Textpattern hacks
Written at 17:15, on Friday 7 October 2005. Tags: accessibility usability webdesign website .
This is just a collection of hacks I’ve implemented for my Textpattern installation, and a note on update management..
- Fix the tabindex for comments. A proper tabindex ensures that you can fill out the comment form quickly by using the keyboard’s TAB key to jump from input field to input field. Unfortunately, Textpattern doesn’t specify a tabindex for the
previeworsubmitbuttons. Jared has the solution. - Installed the super archive plugin for Textpattern to create the archive.
- With the ob1_title plugin I’ve adjusted the title tags to reverse the default format. Titles are displayed as “article title | site name”.
- Installed the Live Comment Preview plugin (via John Hicks). I made two little changes though: I removed the
<div class="comment">and the<p class="author">. They were unnecessary and were screwing with my stylesheet. I also added the<label>tags for the checkboxes, which improves accessibility and usability.
Textpattern update management
And finally, a word on update management. Since I use Dreamhost (domain transference still in progress1), I’m able to login with SSH and update my files locally on the prompt. This is über-geekiness but it also allows me to make a Subversion checkout of Textpattern like this (make sure you cd to the proper domain directory first):
svn co http://svn.textpattern.com/development/4.0/This will create a live checkout from the latest stable branch of Textpattern. Then it’s very easy to locally modify the files, wether by using VIM in the shell or by using FTP and my local editor. Upgrades are as easy as this:
svn upThis will fetch the remote updates and merge my local changes. I can even svn remove setup so that the setup files are not added again. In short, I can apply the basic workcycle with Subversion. Very nifty.
1 Well, there are still problems with adjusting the DNS servers on Lycos, so for now I’m using a .htaccess which simply redirects everything to jeroencoumans.dreamhosters.com:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://jeroencoumans.dreamhosters.com/$1 [R=301,L] Comments closed | Permalink
