Questions about Pages

[mstralka]

Hi all,

I'm evaluating Apostrophe for use on a new website and have a few
questions:
1. I don't see a place to make the <title> different from the slug for
a Page - is that possible? Sometimes we want a nice short slug in the
URL but a longer, more descriptive Page title.

2. When I create a new page, should it put a slot into the page with
the page's name/title? I thought it was doing that automatically
before but now I don't see that behavior. Maybe I'm imagining it.

3. I know META tags are not very useful anymore but clients sometimes
insist on being able to set the keywords and description tags for each
page. Is this possible?

4. Is there a Markdown or Textile slot type available? If not I might
build one because I hate WYSIWYG editors

Thanks
Mark

[Tom Boutell]

Hi mstralka,

It's very easy to make the title and the slug different. Right now,
when you edit the title, the slug does *not* change. (We're actually
talking about changing that behavior so that the slug does change but
a redirect is kept around unless a new page takes over that URL.
Feedback on that idea is welcome.)

Conversely, you can edit the slug from the page settings dialog, with
no impact on the title. The slug does not have to bear any
relationship to the site's page hierarchy although they will if you
don't edit them.

> 2. When I create a new page, should it put a slot into the page with
> the page's name/title?  I thought it was doing that automatically
> before but now I don't see that behavior.  Maybe I'm imagining it.

Click "This Page," and you'll see an administrative breadcrumb roll
down. Click on the title of the page to edit the title.

There is a title slot, yes, although we don't call 'a_slot' anywhere
to stuff it into the page apart from all the places it appears as
navigation. It is automatically stuffed into the title element. But
you can call a_slot('title') if you want to and style it as a heading,
etc. in your own layout or templates.

> 3. I know META tags are not very useful anymore but clients sometimes
> insist on being able to set the keywords and description tags for each
> page.  Is this possible?

Not currently. This is a common enough request that it should probably
happen. We could even make it useful by considering that information
in the implementation of the built-in site search feature. I suggest
that you open a ticket on trac.apostrophenow.org so you can stay in
the loop on this one.

> 4. Is there a Markdown or Textile slot type available?  If not I might
> build one because I hate WYSIWYG editors

Heh. No, there currently is not. I suggest that you look at the
implementation of the plaintext slot (aTextSlot), because it is a very
simple markdown/textile style editor in a sense - it quietly
implements line breaks as br's, URLs as links, emails as links etc.
and does a two-way transformation back to text so you can edit it
again.

You don't have to do the two-way transformation, of course, if you
don't mind the overhead of calling textile() or markdown() at
rendering time in your normalView partial. Then you can just store
textile or markdown. Or you might choose to store both the rendered
version and the source code version in the slot (a little wasteful,
but disk is cheap and CPU time less so).

Keep in mind that we have civilized the rich text editor - we really
do filter the HTML that comes out of it, it's not possible to wreck
the page by pasting from Word (at last, no more confused client calls
about that). But if it's for your personal use and you just hate rich
text, hey, go for it.

Hope this is helpful!

--
Tom Boutell
P'unk Avenue
215 755 1330
punkave.com
window.punkave.com

[Quentin Dugauthier]

Regarding the "slug change on title change" stuff:

There is only one thing that prevent me from liking the idea: imagine a user changes a title but forgets to change links in the site. No problem since you thought of adding a redirect ! Three months later, he create a new page with a title that matches the old slug. => No more redirection and all the links are broken at once. This delay between the change and the erratic behaviour does not feel right for me.

I would totally love the idea if there was a way to link to a page from within the rich text editor using a tree view or something like that (and page id would be saved with the link rather than the URL).

Does that make sense ?

Mstralka, if you ever implement the Markdown slot, I would love to have a look at it !

Quentin.

[Geoff DiMasi]

Hi Mark,

You can change the Page Title and the slug of any page. They can be completely different, as well.

When you create a page and give it a name, that sets the original title and slug.

If you want to change the page title:

1. Click on the "This Page" button in the top left (while logged in).
2. Click on the name of the page in the bread crumb. It will turn into a field and you can change the name.
screenshot: http://www.flickr.com/photos/punkavenue/4403316709/

If you want to change the slug:
1. Click on the "This Page" button in the top left (while logged in).
2. Click on the GEAR next to the page title. This will open Page Setting.
3. Change the page slug.
screenshot of page settings: http://www.flickr.com/photos/punkavenue/4404081736/in/photostream/

___________________

You can add Meta Tags (description, keywords, etc) when you are building the site. We are planning on adding this to the admin when we add a Global Site Settings tool. (We are also planning on letting them add their Google Analytics code in the Global Settings.)

____________________

As to the Markdown/Textile question... I agree with you. I really like using Markdown. We just found that our clients generally preferred Rich Text editors. We will likely upgrade to CK editor or see what happens with the 37 Signals Rich Text project that they announced a while back. (We are using Rich Text in our Basecamp now. We are one of the 20 teams with rich text turned on in Basecamp and it is really pretty good, so far.)

This is a screenshot of how 37 Signals implemented:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/punkavenue/4404096624/

It would be nice to have a Markdown or Textile slot option. Let us know how you make out on that. If you don't get it, we might add it.

We do have a plain text slot that you can use instead of the rich text slot. You can check that out in the demo.

Thanks for checking it out.

Let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,
Geoff

--
Geoff DiMasi

P'unk Avenue
215 755 1330

http://punkave.com

[mstralka]

Thanks a lot guys - very helpful. I opened a ticket for META tags:
http://trac.apostrophenow.org/ticket/144

I'm going to check out the plain text slot and see if that will fit my
need, otherwise I'll build a Textile one and share it. I'm used to
the Confluence wiki syntax and it's a derivative of Textile so I'll
probably just be scratching my own itch there.

Thanks again guys - this is a great CMS so far.
Mark

> 215 755 1330http://punkave.com

[Alexander "Spike" Brehm]

Regarding the Meta tags, different title, Google Analytics and popup page tree for linking, we have already added these customizations to our Apostrophe install and it was quite straightforward.  

I made a quick (silent) screencast demoing some of these changes.

http://spikebrehm.net/spike-apostrophe-additions.swf

They fall in to a few categories:

SEO

* HTML title

* H1 Title

* Keywords

* Description

Google Analytics

* A/B tracking

Link Area Setting

* Allows a link like "Privacy Policy" to show up in the footer instead of main nav (didn't demo this one)

Page Tree Linker

* A popup modified version of the Reorganize page tree which allows the user to select a relative slug from both a custom slot and a RichText slot

Image cropping

* Both fixed-aspect based on slot and arbitrary cropping

At our upcoming Lab Day I'm planning to release one or more of these as a plugin for Apostrophe.  Glad to answer any questions.

Cheers

Spike

[mstralka]

Very impressive. When is your Lab Day?

On Mar 3, 12:16 pm, "Alexander \"Spike\" Brehm" <oce...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Geoff DiMasi]

Spike,

These are awesome!

Looks like we can close a few tickets in the very near future.

Can't wait for your lab day.

Geoff

--
Geoff DiMasi
P'unk Avenue
215 755 1330
http://punkave.com

[Alex Gilbert]

Yeah, some really nice feature additions here, Spike. Thanks for
posting this video.

--
Alex Gilbert
P'unk Avenue
215-755-1330
al...@punkave.com

[Alexander "Spike" Brehm]

Thanks for the supportive response! Our lab day is sadly only every other sprint right now, so not until April 6, but if there's demand I could do this earlier on my own time :).

Also, to release these as plugins i'd like to seek some advice from the P'unk guys for how to cleanly package a plugin in a way that won't clobber future upgrades.

Alternatively, I could send the code to the P'unk guys if they want to integrate it directly into the trunk. But they seem plenty busy :)

Spike

[Tom Boutell]

Hi Spike,

This stuff is awesome. Thanks for doing it.

Much of this I think would be easiest for us to merge into the core:

The link selector
The meta keywords and description
The cropper

There are some things that we might want to review from a design
perspective (we're already discussing a new approach to renaming pages
and slugs), and some things that are probably pretty specific to what
you're doing but might be great as a plugin (the A/B testing).

For now I would love to have a diff so we can look at merging it ourselves.

Are you good with us releasing this under the Apostrophe license (MIT license)?

Thanks again for sharing compelling features with the rest of us.

--
Tom Boutell

P'unk Avenue
215 755 1330

punkave.com
window.punkave.com

[Alexander "Spike" Brehm]

Thanks Tom, I guess all that time spent helping me get Apostrophe through my thick skull has paid off, haha.

I'm fine with release under Apostrophe license. I'll get you diffs when I get a chance, hopefully today or tomorrow.

Cheers
Spike

[Tom Boutell]

Fantastic Spike, looking forward to it!

[Daniel Lohse]

On 03.03.2010, at 15:11, Tom Boutell wrote:

> Hi mstralka,
>
> It's very easy to make the title and the slug different. Right now,
> when you edit the title, the slug does *not* change. (We're actually
> talking about changing that behavior so that the slug does change but
> a redirect is kept around unless a new page takes over that URL.
> Feedback on that idea is welcome.)

Just chiming in here: I'd find that a very, very nice functionality to have! :)

Cheers, Daniel

[Alexander "Spike" Brehm]

Good news, our last SunRun Labs day at work was a great success and very productive for the team, so we've instituted them each sprint.  Which means that Tuesday I'll be working on my first Apostrophe plugin, either for image cropping, SEO page settings, or Google Analytics page settings.  Maybe all if I have the time.  As a heads up Tom, I'll be picking your brains on the best way to package a plugin and to properly maintain upgrade paths, extend the apostrophePlugin code, etc.

Can't wait

Spike

-- 
Alexander “Spike” Brehm | Software Engineer, Front-End Systems
SunRun Inc. <http://www.sunrunhome.com/> 
direct  415.684.9838 | mobile 602.828.2358
 
clean solar energy without the high upfront costs

[Geoff DiMasi]

Hey Spike,

That is great news.

Very cool that you are going to be able to spend time on plugins at lab day. You might end up being the first person (not part of team P'unk Ave) to submit a plugin. 

Geoff

--
Geoff DiMasi
P'unk Avenue
215 755 1330
http://punkave.com

[Peter Bowyer]

This is all very cool. Any timescale to have these features (or just
the link tree) integrated with Apostrophe?

Peter

[Alexander "Spike" Brehm]

I want to release this stuff ASAP, but I've been handed an impossible deadline and told to make it possible :).  So after I get my Apostrophe site launched I'll be able to spend the time releasing it.  Think April.

Spike

-- 
Alexander “Spike” Brehm | Software Engineer, Front-End Systems
SunRun Inc. <http://www.sunrunhome.com/> 
direct  415.684.9838 | mobile 602.828.2358
 
clean solar energy without the high upfront costs

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