Control you blank pages Print
By Patrick LEFÈVRE published on 2011 12 22

Direct link to this article : Version française disponible ici

In some case, you have to control temporary the content page even if this content is empty. Imagine your client wants a new brand blog section on his website. You work hard to add it. All works fine but your client still hasn’t written anything. And it is likely that the wait is still long. Visitors who access the blog could therefore see nothing!

Textpattern is a CMS based on articles publishing. So we can test if the page is populated and if not display a waiting message or anything else.

In your page template, add (or change it) with this few lines:

<txp:if_article_list>
<txp:php>
$count_article = safe_count('textpattern', 'Section = "blog" and Status = "4"');
if( $count_article == 0 ) {
echo parse ('
<h2>Waiting</h2>
<p>We are really sorry, but it seems that there are no articles for the moment.</p>
<p>Please, comme back later.</p>
<p>We apologize for inconvenience.</p>
');
} else {
echo parse('
<txp:article limit="3" listform="articles_list" />
');
}
</txp:php>
<txp:else />
<txp:article limit="1" form="article_individual" />
</txp:if_article_list>