Well its’ been quite a while, but when I saw this extJS theme I simply couldn’t resist an update. It has quite a few bugs but I’m not about to sit around and wait out the next release. Thought I;d get myhands dirty and try to work them out myself.
Comments are currently down due to these bugs but my blog has recently been raped by comment spam so this may be a means to an end.
I mentioned before that I am not a fan of the MyBlogLog reader community widget. As you can see, although my community continues to grow, I still haven’t taken a shining to using the widget. The reason for this is simple, people don’t actually have to read your blog to get their profile linked. I’ve even auto-joined communities just by passing over the same link more than once without even being aware of it. This means that my picture, and therefore my profile and therefore my website, has been linked on websites I’ve never so much as skimmed. Is that fair? No, not really. But if the website’s owner wants to give it away like that, who am I to stop him?
I am still a fan and avid user of MyBlogLog and chose to implement the community on my website in a different manner. MyAvatars is a plugin that displays the commenter’s Gravatar or their MBL avatar next to their comment. I found this was more of an everybody wins approach to using display pictures because they still get their profile linked and I, in return, get a comment.
After all, wasn’t that the original intention of having a blog as opposed to just a collection of articles? Getting comments? Many of us choose to reward our commenters with a top commentators list (much like the one I have). Well would it make sense if all somebody had to do was load my page to get onto the top comments list? Ofcoarse it wouldn’t. So, to me, it just makes good sense for someone to have to comment in order to get their picture on this website.
Are you looking for a way to integrate your outer site with Worpress? Getting the theme to match your other pages is hard enough, integrating with Wordpress permalinks is a whole other battle. By default, Wordpress does not allow you to publish any php code in the custom page editor. There are a few simple ways around this. Theres the easy way, and the way that I used to think was pretty easy.
In the beginning I would actually get down and code my own pages to include the Wordpress theme tags. I would then upload the file into my main directory and manually code the link to the page into the navigation. Then I later realized that Wordpress has a feature to do this in a much simpler manner, and your new page will fit the permalinks. So lets open up our favorite text editor and get going.
Define the Template
To get things rolling, define your page as a template. To do this, use the format below using whatever template name you want
< ? php /*
Template Name: Most Popular
*/
?>
Then add the wordpress template tags to include your theme. < ? php /*
Template Name: Most Popular
*/
?>
< ? php get_header(); ?>
<div id=”content”></div>
< ? php get_footer(); ?>
Code, code, code away
From here it is all about your creativity. You can code anything you want in here. Php and template tags are also available to you now. In the case of one of the pages I’ve made so far, I just used the template tags for the Popularity Contest plugin. You can use any code you want, this doesn’t just go for plugins. Have fun with it.
<ul><?php akpc_most_popular(); ?></ul>These tags went within the main div. Don’t forget, the main div id is usually called “Content”. Be sure to check before you publish this page.
Time to integrate
Once you’ve got your custom page coded up, its’ time to put the template to work. Save the file you’ve been coding. In my case its saved as ‘Most-Popular.php’ and upload it to the directory of your theme. www.example.com/wp-content/themes/mytheme/
Go into WP’s admin area. Create a new page. Write the post title and stop.
Now you go to the sidebar of the ‘write page’ screen and find the menu called ‘Page Template’.
Select your new template and publish the page. Now its’ time to check out your new page. It will be integrated into your navigation automatically.
There you have it. You’ve made yourself a wordpress template.
When I dropped the music format here, I promised a new site was coming. I even went as far as to register a domain and post the occasional link to this upcoming Canadian music review spot (see? I just did it again). Well that is about all the progress anyone has seen so I thought I would let you all in on how it is coming along.
The site will be in blog format, but divided by monthly issues. I’m either going to release each issue in bulk, or set them to be autoposted in weekly or daily intervals. I am almost ready to go live with a beta preview version of pressriot.ca, which means a scaled back version to gain some user input before the big release. The site will go live and people will be able to read and rate all the articles.
As far as the writing and content production, it is going pretty well. I have enough articles on my own and I’m waiting on some other submissions, I have just about enough to do the first issue.
The development stages are basically finished, save for once people actually get in and start to try it out. It was relatively simple to get a working model going being that I planned on using Wordpress as the core.
The inlying challenge was to get it up and running with enough distinction from section to section. I wanted to have the main blog page more category oriented rather than just laying out all the freshest posts in reverse chronological order. Sounds like exactly the opposite of WordPress doesn’t it? Well it can be done.
Once again, its all in the theme. The theme essentially structures everything using the loop. You can call anything from just the post content of a single post, single category, anything really. I’ll get more into this when I talk about the awesome theme I discovered in a later post. When will it be? You’ll have to subscribe to the feed if you don’t want to miss it.
I’ve been testing the core of the site in a far away secret location, nobody will ever find in order to keep things under wraps. Nothing is currently hosted under the pressriot domain. Its all on a secret account hosted an a sea-barren shanty, floating in uncharted off the coast of Zürich. It is guarded by a one-eyed crow with a hooked beak. He will peck out the eyes of anyone who attempts to spoil the surprise.
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Well its’ been quite a while, but when I saw this extJS theme I simply couldn’t resist an update. It has quite a few bugs but I’m not about to sit around and wait out the next release. Thought I;d get myhands dirty and try to work them out myself.
Comments are currently down due to these bugs but my blog has recently been raped by comment spam so this may be a means to an end.
I mentioned before that I am not a fan of the MyBlogLog reader community widget. As you can see, although my community continues to grow, I still haven’t taken a shining to using the widget. The reason for this is simple, people don’t actually have to read your blog to get their profile linked. I’ve even auto-joined communities just by passing over the same link more than once without even being aware of it. This means that my picture, and therefore my profile and therefore my website, has been linked on websites I’ve never so much as skimmed. Is that fair? No, not really. But if the website’s owner wants to give it away like that, who am I to stop him?
I am still a fan and avid user of MyBlogLog and chose to implement the community on my website in a different manner. MyAvatars is a plugin that displays the commenter’s Gravatar or their MBL avatar next to their comment. I found this was more of an everybody wins approach to using display pictures because they still get their profile linked and I, in return, get a comment.
After all, wasn’t that the original intention of having a blog as opposed to just a collection of articles? Getting comments? Many of us choose to reward our commenters with a top commentators list (much like the one I have). Well would it make sense if all somebody had to do was load my page to get onto the top comments list? Ofcoarse it wouldn’t. So, to me, it just makes good sense for someone to have to comment in order to get their picture on this website.
Are you looking for a way to integrate your outer site with Worpress? Getting the theme to match your other pages is hard enough, integrating with Wordpress permalinks is a whole other battle. By default, Wordpress does not allow you to publish any php code in the custom page editor. There are a few simple ways around this. Theres the easy way, and the way that I used to think was pretty easy.
In the beginning I would actually get down and code my own pages to include the Wordpress theme tags. I would then upload the file into my main directory and manually code the link to the page into the navigation. Then I later realized that Wordpress has a feature to do this in a much simpler manner, and your new page will fit the permalinks. So lets open up our favorite text editor and get going.
Define the Template
To get things rolling, define your page as a template. To do this, use the format below using whatever template name you want
< ? php /*Template Name: Most Popular
*/
?>
Then add the wordpress template tags to include your theme.
< ? php /*Template Name: Most Popular
*/
?>
< ? php get_header(); ?>
<div id=”content”></div>
< ? php get_footer(); ?>
Code, code, code away
From here it is all about your creativity. You can code anything you want in here. Php and template tags are also available to you now. In the case of one of the pages I’ve made so far, I just used the template tags for the Popularity Contest plugin. You can use any code you want, this doesn’t just go for plugins. Have fun with it.
<ul><?php akpc_most_popular(); ?></ul>These tags went within the main div. Don’t forget, the main div id is usually called “Content”. Be sure to check before you publish this page.
Time to integrate
Once you’ve got your custom page coded up, its’ time to put the template to work. Save the file you’ve been coding. In my case its saved as ‘Most-Popular.php’ and upload it to the directory of your theme. www.example.com/wp-content/themes/mytheme/
Go into WP’s admin area. Create a new page. Write the post title and stop.
Now you go to the sidebar of the ‘write page’ screen and find the menu called ‘Page Template’.
Select your new template and publish the page. Now its’ time to check out your new page. It will be integrated into your navigation automatically.
There you have it. You’ve made yourself a wordpress template.
When I dropped the music format here, I promised a new site was coming. I even went as far as to register a domain and post the occasional link to this upcoming Canadian music review spot (see? I just did it again). Well that is about all the progress anyone has seen so I thought I would let you all in on how it is coming along.
The site will be in blog format, but divided by monthly issues. I’m either going to release each issue in bulk, or set them to be autoposted in weekly or daily intervals. I am almost ready to go live with a beta preview version of pressriot.ca, which means a scaled back version to gain some user input before the big release. The site will go live and people will be able to read and rate all the articles.
As far as the writing and content production, it is going pretty well. I have enough articles on my own and I’m waiting on some other submissions, I have just about enough to do the first issue.
The development stages are basically finished, save for once people actually get in and start to try it out. It was relatively simple to get a working model going being that I planned on using Wordpress as the core.
The inlying challenge was to get it up and running with enough distinction from section to section. I wanted to have the main blog page more category oriented rather than just laying out all the freshest posts in reverse chronological order. Sounds like exactly the opposite of WordPress doesn’t it? Well it can be done.
Once again, its all in the theme. The theme essentially structures everything using the loop. You can call anything from just the post content of a single post, single category, anything really. I’ll get more into this when I talk about the awesome theme I discovered in a later post. When will it be? You’ll have to subscribe to the feed if you don’t want to miss it.
I’ve been testing the core of the site in a far away secret location, nobody will ever find in order to keep things under wraps. Nothing is currently hosted under the pressriot domain. Its all on a secret account hosted an a sea-barren shanty, floating in uncharted off the coast of Zürich. It is guarded by a one-eyed crow with a hooked beak. He will peck out the eyes of anyone who attempts to spoil the surprise.