Textpattern is limited in that I can’t independently create *sections* and *pages*. What I’d like to do is create an array of pages and then create, as it were, “views” which tie together a particular section with a particular page.

I.e., a “page” should correspond to a way of mapping the entry database to HTML. A “section” should correspond to a way of selecting articles out of the database, based on a singular tag or a more complex set of rules. Then we should have “views”, which say “present section X using page Y”.

The problem is that (1) A given article may only belong to one *section*, and (2) Textpattern only lets us assign a specific *page* to a specific *section*. So let’s say I want to have two different renderings of the articles on the front page, one with a larger font and different color set, and one which only shows the first, say, 50 words of each post. Apparently I can’t do this.

This is just a temporary solution, because I want to create a better piece of blogging software at some point (and I’m dearthing on time). Not necessarily more configurable and flexible, but just something for me to use. What would be nice, and I’ve posted this before elsewhere, but I’ll reiterate, is the following feature set:

(1) Articles may be shown as excerpts on the front page; however pressing “more” or ‘(+)’ loads the rest of the article, still on the front page, using an AJAX-style data load and dynamic page manipulation.

(2) The “add-comment” form is available and hidden on the main page below each full article. Press the “comment” link and the form instantly appears. Adding a comment is done asynchronously, without ever leaving the main page.

(4) Viewing and paging through comments is done asynchronously, also on the main page.

I’m surprised no blogging tools support AJAX yet, considering that it’s really not that complex to implement what I’m talking about, above. Time to put my money (or fingers?) where my mouth is and start coding this, then.

When I say “the ‘Opera’ of Blogging software”, what I mean is that just like Firefox and Opera differ, in that Firefox is very extensible and it’s easy to add tons of plugins (in fact, you need to, to get certain functionality), Opera has all this optimized and built-in. As a consequence it’s not as extensible, but it does what you want. For example, if you want to save the tabs you have open in your current session so you can restart your computer and come back to the same set of windows/tabs you had open before, Opera has this built in. With Firefox, you’ll need the incredible “Tab Mix Plus”:https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1122/.