This is a draft. —Ed.
This article is intended for Sadie Lou contributors and editors facing the odd challenge of using Textpattern. If you are already confused, turn back now. If you are looking for general help, may we recommend Susan Miller? She has helped us through many moons. More Textpattern help is at TextBook.
Overview
Textpattern makes it easy to add new content to Sadie Lou, and to manage the contents already ‘live’ on the site. It’s similar to using LiveJournal, Facebook, or Wikipedia – but has its own quirks. This article is intended to help you get past these quirks so you can worry about more important things.
Log In
If you don’t already have a login and need one, email one of the editors and they’ll set up an account for you.
Once you have an account, go to sadielou.net/textpattern to log in. This will take you to the ‘Write’ tab under ‘Content.’ Most of the time, you’ll only need to work under the ‘Content’ tab.
Add New Content
The key to this step is good ‘content,’ which has nothing to do with textpattern. This is the hard part, and is outside the purview of this document.
Say you have good content already and want to add it to the site. Under the ‘Write’ tab, simply fill in the Title and the Body with the appropriate content. This can usually be copy-and-pasted, but in the Body, you have to watch out for formatting quirks. Special formatting is achieved using Textile markup.
The simple aspects of Textile are easy to learn: *bold* becomes bold, _italic_ becomes italic, and "link":http://sadielou.net/ becomes a link.
In the left-hand column, click ‘Textile Help’ if you need help with formatting. Under ‘Advanced Options,’ fill in the author’s name under ‘author’ as you want it to appear in the byline. (Don’t include the word ‘by.’)
In the right-hand column, choose the appropriate section and 1 or 2 categories for your article. Then click the ‘Save’ button.
If you have sufficient permissions, once the page reloads, there should be a link next to the Title labeled ‘View.’ Click there to view your article in the site. Otherwise, please email one of the editors, letting them know that your article is ready to be published.