Still plugging away at the site—here’s the latest.
A while back I mentioned that the web site for Tsushima Christ Church would be getting a refresh sometime in the future. That’s still underway—I reached a point of minimal completion a couple of weeks ago, but the catch was that everything was done with static XHTML so it could live at the current Geocities address. We decided it would be better to go ahead and move everything into a CMS so various people in the church could update the site without having to learn the code. A CMS will also handle the tedious task of keeping lists of content updated without user intervention.
This site runs on TextPattern, and not wishing to learn a new system (and believing TextPattern to be quite suitable for our needs), the church’s new site will run on the same platform. This isn’t to say that the transition to a CMS hasn’t been without its quirks. The biggest problem so far has been getting a particular article to display when you go to a section base (like tsushima.deltafour.net/about), but still allowing specific articles to be selected within that section as sub-pages. On Wednesday night I chanced upon a solution that seems to accomplish what I want. Part of the problem is the special TextPattern tags that let you show articles don’t always work the way I think they should. This leads to searching for a working solution via a series of small modifications to try to find out exactly how a tag behaves. What I have now essentially sends every request to an article form that pulls articles based on the section and category. It’s hackish, but it works, and it should take me out of the loop for most alterations to the site.
Some sections, like the photo album, are going to need special treatment. Plus there’s other issues like putting in a page title (I don’t know which article I’m going to pull until after the title tag has been rendered, so the title is blank right now) or getting an image caption to show up (a txp:image_caption tag would be really useful, but it’s nonexistent), so I have some things left to iron out. As always the latest progress is over on tsushima.deltafour.net. Given the need for TextPattern, my deltafour.net server will be the permanent home of the new site. Whether people will have to go to tsushima.deltafour.net or a domain like tsushimachurch.org is another discussion altogether (Tsushima Christ Church might not always be called that, especially if we move out of the Tsushima area in a couple of years).