Posted in: Productivity, Textpattern
Having been using Textpattern since about 2005 or so I must say over the years it has become a must have in my tool box, from personal to corporate projects it is a god send, a time saver and an extremely powerful and flexible tool for rapid development.
One use I have recently been exploring is using Textpattern itself as a personal organizer as well as a content management system. The beauty of this is Textpattern is simple to setup/install even on a local dev environment so it can be used online, offline or both (syncing the two databases on a regular basis) depending on your needs. Not to mention like Mobile Me, Google Apps (Which are both superb btw) you have a central repository that can be accessed from any computer anywhere in the world, and maybe even your mobile device.
Also to mention since it is all run off a MySQL database backups are a cinch. so your data can be kept secure, safe, and can be restored up to any point you wish. In my case the database backs up every 24 hours automatically.
Keeping bookmarks bookmarked
Textpattern’s built in bookmarking is pretty straight forward but also it is a great way to keep and store/organize your favorite sites and such. Much like its articles the bookmarks can be sorted by category and are easily edited, removed and added. You can also quickly add a secure or non secure bookmark page to your txp install simply by outputting a link list styled to your liking and wam! all your bookmarks in one accessible place.
So say you wanted just a list of your favorite blogs, you may output a list like this:
<txp:linklist break="li" category="Blogs" form="Links" label="Blogs I like" labeltag="h3" limit="9999" sort="linksort asc" wraptag="ul" />
Organizing your thoughts
Categories, sections, thoughts, ideas, snippets of info. Everything has a place and with Textpattern you can easily set up your own mind in a array of categories and sections with no limits. Build yourself a page named "My Thoughts" or whatever you like and categorize it the way you need to. Like to keep things tidy and organized? Toss in an archive feature which moves your thoughts off the thought page and places them in an easily retrievable “archive” format for later reference.
Also to note since you are using Textpattern to organize, search is integrated and can be drilled down to a specific section, in this case “My Thoughts” eliminating results for information outside of the zone you are looking for.
A search can be targeted simply by adding a section to the search input like so:
<txp:search_input button=“Search” label=“Search” section=“search” />
Task yourself
Once again utilizing Textpatterns built in forms we can easily build up and populate to do lists based on any category or section. Much like maintaining tasks or organizing thoughts you can organize, control and manage your to-do lists the same way. Items can be sorted by future, past and all so it is pretty simple in keeping lists for over due, upcoming and current tasks.
This article does not quite go as in depth as TXP is capable of but is a nice little summary of other potential uses for the Textpattern system. Hope it is useful and sparks some creativity.