"textpattern" in Weblog

I’ve been very quiet of late and here’s the reason. I’m pleased to announce the launch of Content with Style, finally. It’s been an awful long time coming but we’re finally decided that it’s more important to get the site out there than to sit on it until it’s perfect or we lose interest. So, it’s a bit rough around the edges but we’ll improve and polish it as we go on. It’s our first go with Textpattern too, so some things aren’t quite as we might have liked, probably due to not knowing where to find plugins etc.

Content with Style is intended as a resource for accomplished developers. There won’t be too many beginners articles; we’re aiming more at developers who already know at least a little, if not a lot. For some reason there just don’t seem to be many articles out there for people of that level.

I’ve written two articles for the launch: Modular CSS and A CSS Framework. Both aim to highlight alternative ways of using CSS. I’ve been doing the rounds of web agencies for a couple of years now and all of them could benefit from these techniques. I’m new to writing though, so any feedback is much appreciated.

On a similar note, I’ve started porting DNR over to Symphony and I’m very impressed so far. There are supposed to be big things in the pipeline for the next release candidate. Watch this space.

I’ve had ‘convert website to blogging tool’ on my to-do list for bloody ages now… Well over a year. Right above ‘redesign website’, which has been there for 2 years now. So far I’ve been most impressed with Textpattern and Wordpress but I was just looking at Symphony and it could just be a contender. I suspect that it may not be as customisable as I’d like but it appears to be very well thought out, with a lovely interface and I really like the fact that the 21degrees guys have chosen XSLT for their templating language over a bespoke one.

I had my first real brush with XML and XSLT transormations last week and I am very very impressed. The CMS I’m working with generates XML transformed with XSLT to spit out the navigation elements so I had to give myself a crash course in what it was all about. I still don’t entirely understand the syntax but I can get basic things done thanks to the wonders of the web community.

I started with the W3C Schools’ XSLT Tutorial, with a quick detour through their XPath Tutorial and finished with a handy article from Pascal called XSL: the other way of styling up content. Nice one mate! An hour or so later I was writing my first piece of XSL…

So far I like XSL enough to consider sacking off my planned site migration to TextPattern and instead rewrite it as XML-XSL-CSS… The further separation of style and content just makes sense. Why embed your layout into your ASP/PHP logic? I could redesign my site comepletely and not have to touch the back-end code - I’d just tweak the XSLT and CSS. Now that appeals to me.