The Write page
Textpattern’s Write page is the one you’ll see most. It’s where you do all your article writing, editing, and publishing. Here is a look at the various parts of the page. For a very thorough dissection of this page, see its Textpattern Wiki page.
You can also view a screencast of publishing an article.
- Title field
At the top of the center column, you'll see the field for the Title of your article. NOTE: Titles must be unique to each article.
- Article Text field
The largest input field, directly below the Title, is the Article Text field, where you enter the main text of your article.
- Excerpt field
At the bottom of the center column is the Excerpt field. You can write your own excerpt, or copy and paste a small portion from the main article. Textpattern can also be set up to automatically use the first one or two paragraphs from you article as the excerpt.
- Textile Help
This link is at the top of the left column. When you click it a small list of commonly used Textile cues appears. Click on any question mark for more information. For more information on Textile, see Using Textile.
- Advanced Options
Here you will find a number of useful fields, including custom fields, Keywords, Article image, and URL-only title.
- Custom Fields: depending on what type of blog you are running or what type of article you are writing, custom fields may be used on your site. Most commonly, there may be a field called "sort-order" which you can use to determine the order in which articles appear (normally determined by the publish date/time). Or, if there is additional information associated with the article (like a movie title and director for a movie review article), that might be entered in custom fields.
- Keywords: Many sites are set up to use the Keywords field for tags. Tags should be entered in a comma-separated list. Like "Textpattern, Write page, interface"
- Article image: If you have just a single image to be associated with your article, you can list the ID or name of the image here, and it will appear with the text of your article. To use multiple images in your article, see...
- URL-only title: This field comes in handy when you have a very long article title. Most sites are set up to create URLs using the article title, so they can become quite long. For example, the url of an article titled "My Summer Vacation in which I Learned to Make Chocolate Chip Cookies" might look like "http://www.norabrowndesign.com/blog/my-summer-vacation-in-which-i-learned-to-cook-chocolate-chip-cookies". But, if I were to enter "chocolate-cookie-summer" in the URL-only title field, the url would be "http://www.norabrowndesign.com/blog/chocolate-cookie-summer". This is a bit more convenient. NOTE: The URL-only title, just like the actual title, must be unique to each article.
- Create New link
At the top of the right-hand column is a link called Create New. Click on this (after you have Published or Saved your current work!) to create a new, blank article.
- Status
This set of radio buttons sets the status of the article. The choices are:
- Draft: If you are not yet ready for your article to be published, but you want to save it and come back to it later.
- Hidden: Similar to draft, if you have published an article, but later want to pull it from the site without deleting it, you can simply change its status to Hidden.
- Pending: For sites with single authors, this functions very much like Draft. You might use it to indicate to yourself that you are nearly ready to publish the article.
- Live: This indicates the article is finished and ready to appear on the site.
- Sticky: "Sticky" articles are ones that persist in the same place on the page through time, such as "About Me" information. Simply setting the status to Sticky won't accomplish this, however: your site has to be set up to display the sticky article somewhere.
- Sort and Display
This is where you assign your article to up to two categories using the pulldown menus. You must have already create the categories on the Categories page.
Also here is the Section pulldown menu. Most of the time you will be publishing to default section, which can be the "Article," "Journal," or "Blog," section, depending on how our site it set up.
- Comments
If you generally allow comments on your site, you can use this to either turn them off on an individual-article basis, or change the invitation to comment.
- Timestamp
You can change the date and time your article was published to anything you like. Note that if you set this to a date and time in the future, your article will not appear live on your site until that time.
- Publish/Save button
Last but not least is the red Publish/Save button at bottom of the right-hand column. Before you click it for the first time, it is labeled "Publish." Subsequently, it is labeled "Save."
Click it early and often so you don't lose any work due to a power outage or other freak occurrence!
