WordPress – Page 8

Site redesign and a muddle

I often design websites for my friends and they usually just let me do whatever I want and keep their traps shut knowing they are getting 2500 dollars worth of work for free.

But once in awhile they dare to utter a preference such as the time when I made this theme for a friend and she said I want a black colour scheme . Well.
My bf turned traitor (a true Scorpio,him) and said oh yes those dark themed websites look sooo much more fancy. Well, I loved Bella and so I took her home and put her to good use.

However, a lot of things went kablooey after I selected the new theme. On BigFoot I’d done some really experimental and silly archiving pages, and I’d done them totally wrong. So my top menu is now missing links to those pages for the time being.
Continue reading Site redesign and a muddle

WordPress 2.5’s secret weapon is image.php

*Updated due to vagueness!

Image.php is a new file included in the default theme that comes
with WP 2.5 and that you can use to have a light-weight image gallery built right into your theme,no plugin required.

Image.php uses new template tags to display thumbnails of the next and previous images underneath the one main image. This is something I dearly wanted. Look out for the option (inside the code of image.php) to display the attachment image as small medium or large. I picked large but your theme may not have the space,esp. if you are very naughty and don’t resize your images to a fixed-width-theme-friendly size before uploading them.

This isn’t going to replace a cool gallery plugin like nextGen gallery for me. However it does do something that nextGen doesn’t do, which is provide the option for comments on photos, if that is something important to you. And I’m guessing if you want a photoblog it might be. Although Aniga gallery does let you have comments on individual pictures…but in my one usage of that plugin the comment showed up on the picture thumbnail and looked odd.Anything is customizable and that could be taken care of in the plugin scripts or maybe even the css file. But see? Already too much work! And Aniga may not even work with 2.5, anyway. I’ll report if it does when I upgrade the sites that use it.
I got the heads up from this site in the comments section left by Matt Mullenweg himself.

How to use image.php:
Copy image.php from default theme folder to your theme’s folder.
To make image.php match your theme’s html is easy. Just replace the content,post and entry divs’ names with the ones your theme uses. Most themes all use the same set of div names so you might not need to customize it at all.

In short image.php is the key to not needing to use plugins for your images ever again…but it is kind of basic looking. I’m sure the geniuses are already working on revving it up.
An example of a real live website using image.php.

Static Frontpage as Home Page in WP

You all must be familiar by now that in WP versions 2.1 and newer we are able to set a static WordPress Page as the Frontpage if we choose to in dashboard>options>reading.
This has been invaluable for WordPress as a CMS users. And I’ve used it practically each time I set up a new installation.Sometimes the sites I set up don’t use anything but static pages.
Anyway, I came across some odd behavior when choosing a static page called home to be the frontpage. Firefox respected the setting of the page titled home to be the page to display when landing on the site. IE didn’t, showing instead the blog page(index.php). It didn’t seem to matter what I did, IE kept right on being strange.
The way I fixed it was to move all the WordPress files except index.php to another directory.Exactly as the WP Codex says to do if you don’t want all the WP files in your root.
I don’t know why this made IE behave. It just did.

Any other people using WP the same way and who might have seen this odd behavior in IE I would love to hear about it.

Fame and Fortune…maybe.

Looks like my one big client might be on the Tyra Banks show.Might be because we all know how these things can seem definite one minute and then you’re bumped off the line-up the next.
Because this is a fetish site and I’m a tad prudish I haven’t included the site in my portfolio.
But if that many people may see the site because they heard about it on the Tyra Banks show you can bet I’m going to add my credit link.
The other reason I never provided my link is that I came on board as the new webmaster to an already designed website.the new pages I made were my design and standards compliant but the old pages were not.I would have to go through about 300+ pages and remake them all in my own theme and templatize them in a sane,organized way.The site uses CuteNews if you can believe that–an outdated but functional CMS.It’s not a very good option because it adds an obtrusive cutenews credit link to every entry of news.I’m just now beginning the transition from CutePHP to WordPress.The other reason is that the bulk of the site is a member’s site and not that many people get to see it unless they want to pay to join up.
So I’m glad that I took the initiative to remake all the tours in my own design.
I’m also glad that I took the initiative to open a Youtube account for my client because it might have been how the Tyra producers even got wind of my client.And I’m even more glad that the site has 0 percent topless and 0 percent bottomless nudity.
Again proving to myself that any website can be run with wordpress I am manually transferring all of the site content to wordpress posts.
Thanks to 2 very handy WPplugins the process has been finetuned to tedious data entry.There was tool to import from cutenews to wp but it erased everything and didn’t grab categories or anything besides text,titles and dates skipping links and images.I might have been inclined to go through each imported posts and put in the right urls,etc.But I wasn’t so inclined.Why make more work for myself than I have to?

Here are the plugins:

I used Ryan’s plugin to make sure that each category had it’s own single post view that included the category page template and sidebar specific to that category,etc.