It's been such a long time since I've posted anything here, and this is just going to be a technical post. Based upon feedback from different users, and the general direction of questions, I've released quite a major update of the Giraffe theme and plugin.
Changes include a major overhaul of the admin interface - redundant options have been removed, and the interface has been simplified. Where possible I have used diagrams to show what the configuration options will change.
You may have noticed a small drop-down menu labelled 'Localization' in the sidebar of this blog. It's something I've been playing about with since localizing the Giraffe theme and, while it doesn't magically translate the entire blog, it does provide a viewer with a simple method to change the locale.
But what is a locale? In WordPress terms it refers to the framework around which your posts are displayed. That is, the words, phrases, dates, and times, that surround your posts.
I've added a small Pinyin converter to the InScript plugin. Pinyin is a method of transliterating Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet. As Chinese is a tonal language, it is important that these tones are included in the pinyin. This is achieved through the use of accents and other marks over certain vowels.
The reason for the converter is that these accents are not easy to type, especially for people with keyboards in an accent-less language (i.e. English). It is possible to enter the characters using some form of character mapping tool, or by entering the HTML code directly, but this is not an intuitive method.
I've been tinkering away on a WordPress plugin idea I've had, and it's now finished and available for download.
It's a bit of a complicated plugin to explain fully, but the core effect is very simple: it is an expandable pattern matching script engine. Phew, what a mouthful!
Basically it means that you can insert patterns into posts, or have patterns applied to dates, titles, even the whole blog. These patterns can contain variables and functions that, when InScript processes them, will insert or manipulate the data as the page is being generated.
We generally become WordPress users to create a blog for everyone to see. This can involve the purchasing of a domain name and web hosting. These we treat as black boxes on which the WordPress software is installed, and everything magically works. This is exactly how it should be.
Although WordPress provides a comprehensive management interface, there are times when it would be better to have our own local copy, running on our own machine. There are several reasons we would want to do this:
In previous guides we have concentrated on the building blocks of creating a WordPress theme. A basic design structure has been defined, followed by enclosing header and footer elements, and finished off with a navigational guide. While important aspects of any blog, they are secondary to its main purpose: the content.
In this fourth and final part we carefully dissect the process of taking the content from WordPress and arranging it on screen. Attention is paid to the many alternative methods of grouping this information, from the many posts of the front page to search results and archives.
We will look at how WordPress distributes the responsibility for this work, and how everything is tied together with the all-seeing all-knowing construct known as ‘The Loop’.
By the end of this guide we will not only have a fully working theme, but we should have enough experience and knowledge of WordPress to be able to extend our theme beyond the basic design presented here.
Personalising a blog can require patience and perseverance. There are times when it seems a fruitless task and the blog absolutely refuses to do what you want, despite your best efforts. There are many sources of information on the internet, but it can be hard to locate exactly what you need.
One of the simplest solutions is to look at other people’s work and see if you can make use of their ideas. This is the third part in a series of articles concerned with the dissection of the default WordPress theme, Kubrick. The hope is that walking through this theme may provide help for your own blog or, at the very least, open up new areas of research. After all, there is no shortage of information out there.
Web design is a notoriously tricky subject. Often we give up any thoughts of innovation when the process of realising them is such hard work. Part two of this WordPress dissection continues to try and explain the basic workings of the software, how this relates to the layout, and how anyone can personalise their blog.
The focus will be on finalising the basic layout from part one, and then finishing the header and footer sections. Both of these are important as they stylistically define a blog and act as visual focal points – do it well and people will want to read your blog, do it badly and they may not even bother.
Yet more WordPress activity. This time I've organised my collection of hacks and made a seperate plugin page, available from the navigation menu. Now I can contemplate the calm and zen-like organisation of the rest of my life.
The plugins are:
Another technical posting...
I was looking for a way to obtain site statistics, and discovered the WordPress plugin StatTraq. It looked perfect in the screenshots, but unfortunately doesn't work with WordPress 1.5. However, a nice hack is available at AdsWorth which does the trick.
By default, the plugin does not create any link to itself from the administration screen. A suggestion was made on the StatTraq forum, but again this doesn't work for WordPress 1.5. It is very easy to adapt it though, and I've included the change here in case it's useful to anyone.
Those all-important RSS feeds:
Posts (or get it via email)
Comments RSS