CogBlogged Tagged ‘wordpress dissected’

It’s been a while but it is time to add to my collection of WordPress Dissected where I break down web sites I have been building using WordPress but with some moderate to severe template wrangling. Today I present an NMC project set that is sort of a Zen Riddle. If a blog has no posts is it a web site? This is the editing area for a finished web site: How? Why? The web site is made up entirely of WordPress pages, because there is nothing chronological in the site’s structure (though if we ever added a news section it would be easy). There was a reason I organized it around Pages… and I cannot remember why, but had something to do with being able to list the pages in a sidebar. I think. To be honest, the work started more than a year ago and the site sat [...]

My colleague Rachel Smith presented a nice little WordPress challenge to re-create what she had done previously as old skool manual HTML page updating into her WordPress blog (see Postcards back through time). In the spirit of previous documentation of WordPress Theme hacking, here is the under the hood things I did, some variations on ones I have written previously WordPressing Dissected: Pachyderm Services and Making of a New Site: NMC Virtual Worlds. This current write up includes a custom category template, direct database querying, custom fields, and maybe a little elbow grease. Firstly, the original site of Rachel’s postcards features her original artwork, with the most recent one at the top, and icon links to previous works below. I would guess creating a new one is making a new HTML page, copying some source code to the top of the index, and updating the icons below. Maybe it’s not [...]

Besides manually updating six separate instances WordPress (to version 2.6) in the NMC fleet of sites, I also finally paid some over due attention to the version of WordPressMultiUser I have had up since November 2007. This tool some rustling to get it to the right version and also what had not been done in a while- making the front door. I am hardly a WPmu guru, certainly no bavatuesday… maybe a bavalatethursdaymorning. Most places running WPmu are doing it to provide a blog hosting service, like edublogs or the crazy stuff the Rev does at Mary Washington. My need was to have a series of separate sites hosted in WordPress w/o having to have an even bigger fleet of separate installs (Heck, maybe one day I can rope them all in under the WPmu hood). No these are all a series of online publications we have done at NMC [...]

In the vein of last February’s WordPress Dissection where I detailed the ripping apart and patching together of a WP template, here’s another bit if funny business I recently did in my favorite technology tool. More or less, I have a main WP site, with a nested second complete WP site sitting inside of it, yet they are themed and connected to each other in away to make them work as one. For the last two years, I have been running the NMC Campus Observer, a site that documents the projects and events of the NMC’s activity in Second Life. The design of this site is a blow apart of one of the more basic templates, Blix, as described back in May 2006 as WordPress Theme Philosophy. In 2006 there was not a great deal of things happening in education, and I spent a lot of time and energy writing, [...]

Let me join the Jim Groom Kum-Ba-Ya I Love WordPress Chorus. In this least year, I’ve rolled out 3 NMC web sites that are published via WordPress, with each one going deeper into the bowels of the templates and just more jazzed how I can bend them to my will, casting CSS, PHP, plugins, MySQL to do my bidding. This is unlike drupal, where after a year I am still trying to figure out just how the heck it works and manages information. Its still a grey murky, opaque blue gumdrop box. I am trying to summon the drupal love, and it aint happening. But WordPress, you make me sing. In this blog post that portends to be a monster one of length, I am going to dissect a new site I worked in gory technical detail. On each of these sites, I have started with a standard template and [...]