It’s just starting to rain. I’m a bit nervous, but it should be ok. As promised, here are a few quick tips for hacking Typo.

• Keep A Local Copy of Typo

  Keep a local copy of Typo on your hard drive for all of your hacking and testing. Seems obvious but it’s just a good idea. You’re going to have ruby, rails, and a database installed on your server.

  If you’re on Mac OSX Tiger, this really isn’t all that complicated, except you have to watch out for one thing: Ruby/MySQL. There’s a thousand different articles on how to make it properly work with Tiger, but after a couple hours of trial and error, this article is the only one that actually worked. If you’re sick of all that, just use Locomotive and install MySQL.

• Keeping Track of Changes

  SVK is a good idea for keeping track of changes you’ve made of Typo, but I must confess I don’t know all that much about it. I have my local copy through SVK, but that doesn’t mean I actually know what I’m doing with it. My advice is before ever upgrading your copy of Typo, back up everything. If you’re going to be doing a good deal of hacking, I’d advise you to be on the trunk of typo, that way you can use SVN update or SVK up/smerge/ whatever it is. Oh, and for SVK, make sure you read this.

• Rsync

  Rsync is probably the biggest help in hacking Typo. Once you’ve changed all those files on your local copy of Typo, its all working wonderfully and you want upload it all to your server, if you can, please use rsync. Unless you patiently keep a list of all the changed files, and want to spend an hour uploading, please use this. Especially of you’re on OS X. Most likely you have SSH access if you have rails hosting. When I use the rsync command, I put

  exclude="database.yml"

  in there so that my database.yml won’t get changed, that way I don’t have to worry about restarting the server. It makes uploading take three minutes instead of sixty.

• Adding Your Theme to Other Parts of Typo

  I love Typo for many reasons, but this is a big one. If you have created another section to your installation of Typo, assuming it contains a controller.rb file, you can easily give it your site’s theme. Stick

  layout :theme_layout

  right under the first line in your controller.rb file. Give your new section a new helper.rb, and make sure to put this in it:

  def page_title
        if @page_title
        @page_title
        else
        configvalue("blogname") || "Typo"
        end
        end

  Or else you’re going to be getting errors. Makes adding new sections to your site a breeze.

I’ve got more notes coming, but this is a start. Basically run your own copy of Typo, make sure to back up before you upgrade, use rsync to upload to your server, and now you finally know what helper files are really for if you didn’t know before (I know didn’t). Happy Typo hacking! :D