Textpattern Resources at textpattern.org

Textpattern is a content management system created by Dean Allen. Written in PHP, it was designed to be used with all kinds of web sites, including weblogs. Built into Textpattern is Textile, a simple syntax for nudging plain text into structurally sound and stylistically rich web content. Textpattern has been released under the open source GNU General Public License as of version 1.0rc3.

— Wikipedia

Plenty more useful information in the FAQ.

When you download a plugin, you’ll see a whole bunch of seemingly gibberish text, with hopefully some readable words at the top such as the name of the plugin and the author, etc.

Copy the whole thing (Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C in windows) and then visit your Textpattern’s admin interface, and naviagate to the ‘Admin’ tab and the ‘Plugins’ tab beneath that.

From an end-user’s perspective:

Plugins are modifications to the code, that provide for new features or expanding existing features. This could mean you have a new Textpattern tags you can use, such as <txp:smd_if> or <txp:glz_custom_field> it could give you new features in your admin panel, such as a mysql database manager (via rss_admin_db_manager), etc. etc. Basically, if there is something you want to do with Textpattern for which you can’t find a built-in means to do so, then there’s possibly a plugin for it, or a plugin can be made for it.

From a programmer/developer’s perspective:

Plugins provide an easy way for developers to create new tags for Textpattern templates, and to introduce new features for the back and front end. They are easy to create for anyone with some PHP experience. A new template tag can be as simple as a single PHP function containing a single line of code.

— Threshold State

Actually, I have zero experience using pre-designed themes/templates for Textpattern. Hopefully a kind and more experienced fellow will come along and put some useful text in here.

I do believe that most templates/themes come with their own sets of instructions. You can browse templates at Textgarden, Textpattern’s themes site, or in our Templates section.

The more often a tag is used on a site, the larger its font-size will be.

Instead of prenamed categories or a limited number of assignments, you can assign as many keyword or tags to an article as you feel are relevant. Tags are popularly presented these days in a tag cloud.

On our , the cloud on the left column (in blue) is formed by rss_category_cloud, made up of all available Categories. Big cloud in the middle (green) is formed by tru_tags , which makes tags out of whatever’s in the Keywords box that accompanies each article. See the Keywords = tags entry.

There are certainly other ways to do it.

All plugins, mods, etc. that are posted to this site will be kept even after they have out-lived their usefulness — perhaps their functionality has been added to the Textpattern code so that a built-in Textpattern tag can fully take the place of what used to be a plugin, perhaps the plugin worked on a very early version of Textpattern and now is incompatible with the current and recent versions.

Each article has a “Flag it” option in its information column. If an article has a broken link, inaccurate information, an orphaned plugin/file, or should be otherwise archived or edited, you can contact the article’s author to inform them, or Flag the article for the Admin’s attention.

If you have tutorials/tips/plugins/templates/etc. that you would like to be more accessible to the Textpattern community, then by all means please register / sign in and post as many entries as you’d like. If you’d rather not do it yourself, please feel free to email the link(s)/information, and it will be posted for you.

If you’re visiting an article and it contains only a short description but doesn’t seem to hold the actual contents of what you’re looking for, check out the links to its left, in the green column. There may be a Download link or an Information URL. There may also be a Forum URL or a link to the author’s website which should direct you to the information that the article describes.

You can tag an article on the admin side by adding as many comma-separated keywords as you’d like in the Keywords box.

If you have something you would like to post, or you would like to edit an existing article, you’ll need to login to access the Textpattern admin panel.

The Help section is a pretty good place to start..

There’s also the About page if you’d like to know where the heck you are.

The place I tend to visit first/most on this site is the Archive, because that’s where all the articles are laid out, and you can quickly jump to what you’re looking for.

Of course, the Search option is also pretty useful for finding things (who’d a thunk?)..

These things? They’re bookmarking links to various social bookmarking sites.

There’s a handy “Subscribe to comments feed” link offerred for every article. Subscribe to this the same way you would subscribe to any RSS or Atom feed.

Maybe someone else knows what Usel is, ‘cause heck if I know. I’ve been meaning to ask Joe for years. I have only his reference to it.