Woah, it is ending? ds106 is almost over? Sigh. Well, sincr i have blog posts dribbled over the last few months, I thought about organizing it a bit better here in the doghouse- it’s not quite archiving, but it does feel like the suitcase needs help to get closed.
cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by demandaj
What I talk about below in likely un-reproducible code is what I did to generate http://cogdogblog.com/tag/ds106
(click for full size image)
Doing this has been part of some other WordPress tinkering around here. The current template here has 2 widgetized sidebars, and I shifted the rightmost one to be the “standard” one that appears on all pages. The left side one, by default, will have blog related things, but I also now use it on a few templates to create more relevant bits.
To allow for a new widget, I edited my functions,php template for the place where it generates 2 sidebars:
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebars(2);
This is how the template I use creates 2 sidebars (this is the simple way, they are called “sidebar 1” and “sidebar 2” in the widget editing screen; other themes may do this differently to name the widgets).
So I just bumped it to create 3 widget areas.
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebars(3);
All of the content is already organized via the ds106 tag used- but the basic template for tagged content is not all that special.
So what I want now is a template specific for my tag- so I make a copy of say category.php and named it tag-ds106.php, which tells wordpress to only use this template for tag archives of ds106.
For the top part of the template, I update the main header for the title I want, and use some conditionals to display an intro paragraph only if this is the first page someone is viewing:
ds106: Digital Storytelling Tagged Stuff
What flows below are the bits, ideas, experiments, projects, assignments, and assorted weird ideas all associated with my participation in ds106, the most innovative open course every, first launched in January 2011.
All of the loop stuff I leave as is, it is the standard stuff a template does to spit out content.
To use my custom sidebars, I change:
to read
This tells WordPress to not use the sidebars.php template, but instead to use sidebars-ds106.php, a custom sidebar template.
This is easy. I make a copy of the sidebars.php statement, and for the code in the first sidebar, I find the line that reads:
This tells wordpress to use Sidebar 1, but now I want it to use 3. One edit:
And now all I have to do is populate the stuff I want in Widget sidebar 3 to show what I want on my ds106 tag pages.
Your mileage will most likely vary with the structure of your templates, but as a rule, you can always override a category or tag archive by this method. For another case, I am using the category I created to document by summer road trip into a custom archive for CogDog Odyssey.
Ahhh, ds106, packed and organized.
