lowquality.net

I have been helping my Whiskerino friend Scrivener set up his new Wordpress stand-alone site.

On the surface things may not appear to be much different compared to the stock theme Scriv selected, but I changed a lot under the hood to get some of the functionality he wanted. The exciting part was being able to help him combine his personal blogspot blog and his Project 365 photo blog (also on blogspot) into one. Basically the 365 blog was imported directly to a category but since Scrivener wanted to keep those posts separate from the other posts I excluded that category from displaying in the front page using the query_posts method and created a page which calls a separate loop excluding all of the other categories. I used something like this:

< ?php
if (is_home()) {
$paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
query_posts("cat=-7&paged=$paged");
}
?>


For the page I changed is_home to is_page ('Project 365') and ("cat=-7") becomes (cat="7")

(You will find examples of this code which leave out all that $paged business. This needs to be left in if the loop appears on a page otherwise your ability to browse through previous posts is compromised.)

I had to create new loops using the new Wordpress 1.5+ loop tags, since FallSeason uses the old WP 1.2 tags (for some reason) and this get_query method wasn’t cooperating with it. So basically the front page and the Project 365 page are rebuilt from scratch. I plan on updating the other files with the new tags soon but will probably only do it as needed.

I also installed a few plugins to make both mine and Scriv’s lives easier: A plugin to batch edit the imported posts (buggy but still a lifesaver and something I think Wordpress should be able to do out of the box). A plugin to include an “About” page in the sidebar so Scriv doesn’t have to edit the code to change his “About Me.” Finally, I installed execphp which allows several custom php-based widgets for the widgetized sidebar. I’ve never used a widgetized sidebar before but I dislike how difficult it is to modify the tags in one, so this made things so I didn’t have to dig into the wordpress admin files and change anything. (If it were my own site I would have turned the widgets off completely and edited my own code, but since I am doing this for someone else I thought it was important to make things fairly easy for Scrivener to change on his own.)

Also, since Scrivener is a flickr fanatic I made him a custom flickr badge for his header. It’s actually three badges displaying different content from his flickr feed.

Actually, I happened to mention to Scrivener that my Flickr account was expiring and he renewed it as payment for helping him with the site, which was a really, really cool surprise! I was having fun working on the blog because I really want to redesign my own site but its just too much trouble to start all over again. I know I will still end up doing a ton more for scrivenings.net but I feel less urgency because it isn’t my own site. I don’t mean that I am less motivated to work on it– quite the contrary– but it is easier to focus on what needs fixing when someone else is making the decisions about what needs to be fixed next.

I’m no php genius, but I think I’m doing pretty well for a hack. Not a hacker, a hack.

Don’t forget to watch us grow beards in November.