Mint & Textpattern mod

— Topic: cms

I'm not the sharpest crayon in the box, and am typically a late adopter of technology, mainly because I'm a cheapskate. However, buying Shaun Inman's Mint was one of the best ways I've ever spent $30. In case you're like me, and are a bit slow on geeky matters, Mint is a stat-tracking system that can be installed on pretty much any platform.

In my case, that platform is the Textpattern CMS. Since I found myself constantly wanting to check Mint, but also making frequent use of Textpattern, I wanted to merge the best of both worlds, so to speak, and have them each accessible from one page. They say necessity is the mother of invention, but really it's just laziness. So, with the permission of Mr. Inman, here is my contribution to the community of people who use both Textpattern + Mint…

Before:

before

After:

after

Basically, I've just hacked a little Mint button into the upper left-hand corner of the Textpattern interface, making /mint/ accessible from any section. Also, I've never been a big fan of the tabs in Textpattern, as the shadows don't line up correctly, and the text is a bit difficult to read against the gradient. So, I have included my custom tab GIF's in this download as well.

You will need to extract the Zip file, and then upload txplib_head.php to your /textpattern/lib/ directory. You will need to upload the GIF files to the /textpattern/txp_img/ directory, overwriting down.gif, down2.gif, tabshadow.gif and up.gif. The mint.gif file will of course be new, and will not replace anything in your Textpattern installation.

I would recommend backing up these directories or files beforehand, in case you decide you want to "roll-back" to the default Textpattern header, or (heaven forbid) you uninstall Mint. Also, if for some reason you want to make any of your own changes, mine can be found on line number 95 of the txplib_head.php file (make sure word-wrapping is turned off).

Note: This presupposes that your installation of Mint is in the default site-root/mint/ directory. If this is not the case, you will need to change the link accordingly. I guess that sums things up. I hope you find it helpful!

Me, elsewhere