Posts filed under 'WordPress'
Is it worth the hassle
1.. Firtly, because blix add pages doesn’t appear to work with newer versions of wordpress,
I have used Page Link Manager by Garrett Murphey.
Not much of one for branching out, I am using his older version on this site, had to modify site code a little, can’t remember why now, Check this but it is a handy plugin. The plugin basically allows you to decide which pages show up in the site’s main navigation.
The site I am currently building will allow multiple users to log in and personally update a specific page.
I have for example a site showcasing the work of others.
To achieve the desired functionality I have created separate templates for each user, (see bottom of post A new page template) and they will be able to upload to that page by posting in a category specific to that page.
So I have set the site to show a static front page, and set posts to be rendered on a news page, excluding categories as necessary, using a snippet of php i found on an earlier search. Category template customization
This page will display posts only by the site admin, news and updates etc.
Now for the users who will upload profile I have created pages and will insert the php to call for specific category relevant to their work.
I Have been dabbling, making changes, and loosing site of overall objectivity; consequently things are a little diffuse cloud like in their structure.Tis the old one, need content and ideas..
Coming soon
July 15th, 2008
To use as base for your customized design, and why?
This site is using the blix theme by Sebastian Schmieg.
I chose this theme a couple of years ago for my blog, primarily because it had a contact form built right into the structure.
I still have some issues understanding all the php, but can splice my css and html in there reasonably fluently now, and have got good functionality with the aid of various plugins. I am fairly sure Sebastian would have kittens if he could see how I have butchered his original code, but hey, it’s all part of the process.
So what about you bloggers out there novice and pro alike.
Code from scratch, ahh or use on of the many available themes.
You only have to take a look at the zen garden to appreciate what can be done just by manipulating the css.
So if you feel inclined just drop a comment in the box below, I’d love to hear your views.
June 29th, 2008
Search engine optimization
Do search engine algorithms send out popular current media based query’s to see where and in what proportion general searches are made, and thus rendering the analytics service you have full of error?
I am quite lazy in this aspect, although improving my methodology, I have on this very blog ‘plugins‘ installed that allow me to add unique headers and meta information to individual pages whilst keeping the ‘on the fly style publishing’.
I rarely do this due to some weird obsessive behavior i have about bloating code, but back to my original thought, this site is getting regular hits from all around the world.
I have had better maps, but you get the general impression. There are areas to investigate.
To travel to the Kamchatka peninsula (hay guys out there.)
It’s about learning to understand your own thought processes, and the processes of others. For example, I had a hit a while ago, from Roswell New Mexico. I was understandably made up, (If you havn’t figured, you might if you stick around.), anyway i have a pic of said event, for reasons of verification in this conspiratorial world.
And to prove to myself that my own processes enabled me to find the pic below with only a small amount of effort.
Any where, everywhere the human spirit can find you, it’s quest for knowledge, or trivia, or something in-between.
Out there with ‘meta madness’
April 30th, 2008
Could I be referring to myself?
and I have some pretty freaky neural connections.
‘She will make me , may she bake or me.’
It came from the chair
Who is slightly insane now, sat on a chair.
Considering the structure of chair in relation to it’s occupant seems to be the considered thing to do.
And drinking tea with sugar, refined of course.
My computer is noisy
Hello voice, what where you saying about the need for more fans,. and he said thats where seoppop comes into it.
April 25th, 2008
WordPress: Unique sidebar content on different pages.
Grab the code and dash, or stick around and read the ramble.
Copy your current sidebar, make modifications, add stuff, rename and save as sidebar2.php
The code
In the page you wish to call sidebar2.php simply replace
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
with
<?php include ('sidebar2.php'); ?>
The long winded ramble
You have your blog up and running, out of the box or a manipulated theme, most likely you will have a sidebar.
Usually here you have links to recent posts, categories, friends and post/comment feeds as standard.
You can add advertising, google ads/ affiliate ads whatever and a variety of other plugins.
The thing is because of the wordpress template system these items will be the same on each page.
The simple solution above allows you to call a different sidebar to a different page.
Go to your dashboard – Presentation – Theme editor and select sidebar.php, copy, modify save as sidebar2.php and FTP the file to the correct place on your allocated server. Eg.
/oikofugic.com/blog/wp-content/themes/evolution, and drop it in there. You should see sidebar.php in the file list, so you will know if you are in the correct location.
Then if it’s your ‘about me’ page, or ‘contact page’ as described above just replace the call for sidebar with a call for sidebar2.
Now that is out of the way the possibilities are endless, you can obviously create as many templates as you wish. Have fun.. Enjoy.
Related posts
Daily Photo
Daily photo is one of my categories from my previous design, and had been set up to not display on the main page when a post in this category was made. The idea behind excluding this was to keep frequent photo posts from clogging up the front page. I tried a couple of plugins, but they conflicted with other previously established functions. See plugin Conflicts
So instead I found a nice little snippet of php which you paste directly underneath.
<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
and it is here if you need it.
<?php if ( !(in_category('15') && is_home()) ) { ?>
A little further down the page if still intact you will find.
<?php endwhile; else: ?>
just above add this.
<?php }; ?>
Surprisingly simple it just says if its category 15, (which is my daily picture category) and if it is home exclude it. Job done.
That is all well and good, but my previous design had my photo posts fitted into the old design were they where restricted in size by the page dimensions, sidebar etc.
I needed a new template for photo specific posts, that would allow me to show the pictures in a larger format.
I had learned that I could create a duplicate template from category php, or if you don’t have that in your theme archive php. Just copy said file and rename it with the id of the category you would like to customize.
ie. Rename the template you want to customize to.
category-15.php
The – and the number representing the id of the category you wish to manipulate.
This works well enough when categories are viewed from category link, and you will see your customization.
However, when viewed directly from post link the post will go to it’s default setting.
What I needed was ‘a display post on specific page’ plugin and after looking far and wide found this nice little number.
I read the description, looking good, read the comments, some users seem confused, I was inspired by the general look of the site design and decided to use the plugin. Installed etc, went through normal plugin CHEKIN protocol, and found no reference, or how to configure it to do it’s job. A little bemused I clicked the direct link to my photo and apprehension was resolved, as I realized the solution was complete as it was.
Very nice job, What can I say.. Excellent. Cheers.
Update
I haven’t yet altered the styles of photo pages, but rest assured bigger pics are on the way. Goodnight.
January 11th, 2008
The Layout
Assuming you have already created a design of your own.
Wordpress makes use of templates that gather aspects of a design then puts them together to complete the finished page..
It can be a little daunting/confusing when beginning to try and integrate your own nicely designed single page across a number of templates.
In its most basic configuration wordpress uses four templates to complete a page. These are:
The header…………….Box1
The main index………..Box2
The sidebar……………Box3
The footer…………….Box4
With help from the graphic below I will try and explain how I have achieved this for my new layout coming soon for this site.
Presentation
From your control panel: edit theme.
You can see that when customizing for this design I have put all meta information, such a doc type, links to style sheet, title, header graphic and navigation into the header php.
You will notice that the wrapper and main div tags are left open at this point, to be closed in the footer php. and sidebar php templates respectively.
In the index php. I have my main content area, and div left within which will house the posts themselves.
Take a look at the graphic below of a slightly shortened version of the finished page, and you will see how the template sections fit together.
Uploading markup structure in this way may seem a little counter intuitive in the beginning, leaving divs open in one area and closing them in another.
I found it very helpful when in the building stage to use comments
to keep track of the closing div for a particular section.
It took me a while initially to get my head around the concept of template driven pages. But with time you will understand how the php pulls the essential components of your design from the various templates in your chosen theme.
January 9th, 2008
Update
Site will be periodically jumping in-between new design
and old, if you arrive during a transitional phase, please forgive the chaos.
One year old
This blog has just turned one year old, and I have just renewed the Oikofugic domain for another twelve months.
Twelve months of wordpress and learning how to integrate a css w3c compliant site into that framework.
And I have deleted half the post, so here is a possible candidate for new footer. Do not panic It is not Hawkwind.
January 4th, 2008
I have been having a few problems with plugin conflicts.
I just wanted to take a moment to remind myself what I have done for sake of reference.
The problem occurs between a pagination plugin, and a category exclusion plugin.
What I am trying to achieve is to exclude photo posts from main page. Done, But with this working my pagination gets screwed up.
I found this little hint on the wordpress codex forum. Here, bottom of page
and is a nice solution, because it does away with the need for the plugin that causes my pagination to go squiffy.
So I have turned off advanced category excluder in favor of the in code solution, and it seems to be working well. My only concern is, and I havn’t checked to be sure…
My page is now set to display max 5 posts, and on a number of pages I get only two. I think these are the pages where the photo posts would have appeared had they not been excluded. This will have to do for now.
I am currently beginning a clean re-code of blog, because with gained experience I know things can work in a more harmonious manner.
I have just finished a site for a client Lynsey Birchall, Photography, and as a addition have added a blog for photographic retouching, using the same base as with this blog, that being blix
It being an example of how a site should be coded.
October 23rd, 2007
More about this plugin from Coffee2Code
I have already used this plugin successfully on my home page in displaying the link for my daily photo section, it is a beast and works as desired. the problem was when publishing a photo more regually than a written post, my most recent post list would become over populated with picture links, which serves no average representational purpose other than to say I have written nothing interesting lately.
I wanted to remove these picture post listings from the recent post list, but how.
I found this article by Lorelle VanFossen, further describing how this code can be used to enhance your website/blog. Check this out. In my side bar I had the wordpress code to gather most recent posts, set to ten as default. I wanted this, but to exclude the daily photo posts.
This is what I had.
<ul class="categories">
<?php BX_get_recent_posts($p,10); ?>
</ul>
And this is what I replaced it with, big thanks to the plugin.
<?php c2c_get_recent_posts(10, "<li>
%post_URL%</li>", "1 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 13 14 16 17"); ?>
The numbers above represent all the categories I post in, Except for 15, which is the category for daily photo post. Cool eh.
Update
Not working in the morning, infact not all day, at home with Molly of the mayhem hence the late night activities on the blog, If you are perusing my site at this time, apologies as to lack of functionality regarding the categories list- Currently giving wordpress errors- trying to sort. I have a plan Stay tuned.
Another Update
WordPress database error: [Not unique table/alias: 'wp_post2cat']
SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS distinct wp_posts.* FROM wp_posts LEFT JOIN wp_post2cat ON (wp_posts.ID = wp_post2cat.post_id) LEFT JOIN wp_categories ON (wp_post2cat.category_id = wp_categories.cat_ID) LEFT JOIN wp_post2cat ON wp_post2cat.post_id = wp_posts.ID WHERE 1=1 AND category_id IN (8) AND (post_type = ‘post’ AND (post_status = ‘publish’ OR post_status = ‘private’)) AND wp_post2cat.category_id NOT IN (15) GROUP BY wp_posts.ID ORDER BY post_date DESC LIMIT 0, 10
the above is the error message displayed when hitting a category link, and I was thinking everything was going swimmingly. Will dabble..
Can’t at the moment fix the problem.
Morning Update
We now have the problem fixed here. All hail the ‘Web-Master’ I hath cast my will upon cyberVille and she submits to my authority. Jesting apart I just re-traced my footsteps, and eventually got back to the significant event that began this brake down of functionality.
For your reading pleasure I will take you on a journey into the land of my confusion.
As described above I had a happy feeling about this plugin, it working as it should in conjunction with the daily photo category.
So when I put back.
<ul class="categories">
<?php BX_get_recent_posts($p,10); ?>
</ul>
And the problem remained, I naturally assumed it had been there for a couple of weeks since I installed it for daily photo cat, and I had just not noticed that the grab category list function was not working.
So got rid of all usage of c2c plug, deactivated it and tested. The problem remained. Stomach lurch. I finally traced it back to another plugin Advanced Category Excluder, which when options changed in the settings to show daily photo in archive list the problem went away.
Not quite sure how the interactions of these plugins caused this situation, but at least I have justified my obsessive tendency to blog about why I am using a particular plugin. Stimulating reading for the google bots. Hello human, are you there. Hah ha.
October 9th, 2007
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