Tackling Comment Spam in Textpattern
Posted on May 04, 2009 in Textpattern and Web Design. - No comments
This month, the website caught the attention of those nasty comment spam people. You know the types, they want to post comments on your most popular pages to exploit your Google page rank and dump some links to their sites all over your pages.
Luckily, Textpattern does a pretty good job discouraging spam by requiring commenters to preview their comments before submitting them. You can also limit the window of opportunity for spammers by restricting the time that people can comment on articles (from 1 to 6 weeks.) Obviously for a site that doesn’t get a lot of comments you’ll probably want to keep the comments open as long as possible!
Simplifying common section content in Textpattern
Posted on November 04, 2008 in Web Design and Textpattern. - No comments
It’s pretty common to have common content that is specific to each section. Often this takes the form of different side-bar content. This is easy to accomplish in Textpattern by creating a form for each section and then including the following code in your page template:
<div id="side" <txp:if_section name="articles"> <txp:output_form name="side_articles" /> </txp:if_section><txp:if_section name="features"> <txp:output_form name="side_articles" /> </txp:if_section><txp:if_section name="default"> <txp:output_form name="side_default" /> </txp:if_section> </div>
This is obviously rather long winded, and as you add more and more sections to your site, it becomes increasingly clumsy. Textpattern 4.0.7 promises us the ability to include tags within tags which would provide a solution along the lines of:
Website makeover
Posted on March 14, 2008 in Web Design and Textpattern. - Comments [2]
With the rain pouring down outside and a few moments to myself I thought it might be nice to give the website a make over after all I’ve never been that satisfied with the old look as it was the product of necessity and limited time. This time however it would be nice to sort out some of the problems.
So what were the objectives of this re-design? The first objective was to simplify the layout and reduce the overall screen clutter and reorganise some of the sections.
Comment [2]