This is a central place for all the odds and ends of tips and tricks I’m come across while learning about textpattern.

discussion of sections and categories from jdueck.net

How to list articles in the same category as the current article

Textpattern’s own take on their semantics

remove those pesky ‘commenting closed’ links

password protect directories under textpattern

using custom forms for includes

email enquiry form

I’m having fun and games with AIX! I have two telnet clients, putty (fantastic client) and KEA!. I’ve been using KEA! successfully but would like to switch to putty, however the function keys didn’t result in the same escape characters being sent as in KEA!.

After a post to google groups and a very helpful link I finally started to make some progress. I only need keys F1 to F20 working and I’m there.

What I had to do was set putty’s setting under Terminal -> Keyboard -> The function keys and keypad to “Xterm R6”. This doesn’t exactly match what KEA! output but its close. The big difference is that with KEA I use ctrl with F1 to F10 to access the keys F11 to F20; on putty this is shift instead of ctrl.

In case it is any help to anyone, here are the outputs of F1 to F12 on the first line, shift and F1 to F12 on the second line, and ctrl and F1 to F12 on the third line, for both putty and KEA!.

putty:

<sup>[OP</sup>[OQ^[OR^[OS^[[15~^[[17~^[[18~^[[19~^[[20~^[[21~^[[23~^[[24~

<sup>[[23~</sup>[[24~^[[25~^[[26~^[[28~^[[29~^[[31~^[[32~^[[33~^[[34~^[[23~^[[24~

<sup>[OP</sup>[OQ^[OR^[OS^[[15~^[[17~^[[18~^[[19~^[[20~^[[21~^[[23~^[[24~

and KEA!:

<sup>[OP</sup>[OQ^[OR^[OS^[[17~^[[18~^[[19~^[[20~^[[21~^[[23~^[[24~

l

<sup>[[23~</sup>[[24~^[[25~^[[26~^[[28~^[[29~^[[31~^[[32~^[[33~^[[34~^[[23~^[[24~

NB F5 is missing from the KEA! one since pressing it while running cat caused cat to coredump!!

Anyway that was today’s crash course in escape chars, my putty is now working well and I can use it for the apps which use the function keys too, which is good news.

I have a new job, which involves working on an AIX box over SSH. It the first time I’ve used command line to do everything I do in a day and its an education – especially as I’m new to korn shell.

Today I wrote my first shell script, it sets the title of my putty window so I don’t get confused which window is which. Here it is:

echo "\033]0;$PWD\007";
if test -n $1
then
        echo "\033]0;$1\007";
fi

I was looking around the web today and came across this:

http://www.rubyquiz.com/

You sign up to the mailing list and they send you a little exercise to do each week – what a great idea! You can only really get to grips with a programming language of any kind if you have a need to create something or have a project of some kind.

The search for the home page tool …. Has taken me to a number of places. These are they, in order.

• Dokuwiki
• PHPWiki
• phpWebThings
• TextPattern (ahhh)

DokuWiki

DokuWiki

I love DokuWiki! We had a requirement at my place of work for a way to manage documents, to replace our existing system of putting everything on shared folders in Microsoft Outlook. I looked into a couple of document management apps but came to the conclusion that what I actually needed was a wiki, for the App Support Team to manage its knowledge and keep updating it easily.

DokuWiki is easy. Its easy to set up, and it has no special requirements. It doesn’t even use a database. This could be seen as a disadvantage but since I was installing it in an environment where it is Microsoft SQL Server or nothing, nothing seemed like a good choice. We set up some access control and branded it to match our corporate identity. Its been embraced by everyone and is a great success.

So why aren’t I using it on this site? Mostly because this site is content-controlled by only me, so I don’t actually want a wiki … I did try it out on here, but really it didn’t work as a way to solve this problem.

PHPWiki

PHPWiki

PHPWiki should have been the answer. Its widely used and loved, and has a database backend, which seems ideal for this kind of site and since I’m hosting on my own servers I can choose what I like. To cut a long story short, it was kind of complicated to set up, possibly I was being ditsy but I don’t usually have problems setting things up. Once it was installed I just didn’t bond with it at all, so that is the end of that!

phpWebThings

phpWebThings

This was a step in the right direction, and a more straightforward installation. It also comes with a cute pink theme which helped its ratings enormously (I know, little things, little minds, etc). I started entering content into it but still hadn’t really made any sense of the admin tools …. when I was still looking for a replacement a week later, I knew that I still hadn’t quite put my finger on it.

TextPattern

TextPattern

A recommendation from a friend (dotjay) and so far, so good!