Posts Tagged: Wordpress
VGVA.com redesign: the frontend
Layout-wise, I made a few changes to VGVA.com. First, a much wider default width (from 800 to 1024 pixels) allowed me a second sidebar. After a lot of experimentation and feedback from the VGVA board, I displayed our sponsors in two cycling blocks (thank you, jQuery Cycle Plugin!), plus a separate block for new “official supplier sponsor” volleyballstuff.net. Team sponsors should be pleased, at least; their logos had previously been stuck below the footer.
VGVA.com redesign: the backend
The first and most obvious aspect of this redesign was moving from a few homebrewed PHP scripts to a proper CMS, namely WordPress. The advantages are obvious—revision history, a full text editor, taxonomies, etc… etc…—are obvious. But I needed a lot more than just a basic CMS for this site, and WordPress was ready:
The VGVA.com redesign
For several months, I’ve been hard at work redesigning the Vancouver Gay Volleyball Association website. Longtime readers will remember previous posts wherein I expressed my insecurities, then my excitement at tackling its redesign in 2008. Now in 2011 comes another redesign, even more extensive.
Northern Voice 2011
And it’s that time of year again. Time to hob-nob with all sorts of bloggers and assorted geeks in UBC’s lovely Life Sciences Centre, with its gorgeous atriums filled with natural light.
WordCamp: Developers
Yesterday was a very, very good day. Why? Because I went to WordCamp: Developers, that’s why! A whole day of knowledge, hot geeks, and interesting people. Though I’ve been tinkering with WordPress for a few years now, I’ve been starting on larger projects for other people (both volunteer and paid). It’s exciting and a little scary.
WordPress Options
I’ve been working on a project that involves reimplementing a site in WP. This specific setup requires quite a bit of custom logic, including several dozen options. It’s interesting work, and I feel I’m really stretching myself as a WordPress developer.
WordPress Queries
A little while ago I had to display author pages for posts of a certain custom type. Let’s call it “portfolio.” Now, I’m still learning, but my understanding is that author page templates require the following logic:
The New Look
Well, that took a lot longer than I expected. But then these things usually do, right?
My Adventures With WordPress 3.0, Part 2: Featured Images
I’ve been playing around with the Twenty Ten theme, which incorporates a wonderful feature called Featured Images. Those have actually been around since 2.9 (where they were called “thumbnails”), but I’ve never gotten around to exploring them.
My Adventure With WordPress 3.0, Part 1: The Install
They say the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. With that in mind, this is the first of a series of posts about me exploring Wordpress 3.0. I’m working on a new project involving a fresh 3.0 install, so I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts on the install process.
Vancouver WordCamp
So I’m finally blogging about WordCamp. I had a great time, met some cool people, and learned so much I almost needed an extra brain. Well, I had my iPhone, does that count? Now I just need to digest everything I’ve absorbed and apply it to my present and future projects.
Progress means…
In the last two years I completed the VGVA.com redesign, to much applause; I began and will soon finish another redesign, which introduced me to an honest-to-gawd CMS (WebGUI, to be precise). And yes, I already knew Wordpress, but I’d only adopted that in the previous year. Recently I’ve begun two more projects, one (volunteer) as part of a team of developers, another as the solo tech guy for a fledgling online commercial venture.
File sorta not found
Well, the site itself works just fine, but it looks like there were a few issues left to deal with.
First, Wordpress wasn’t returning the right status code (404) when a requested page couldn’t be found. That was easily fixed. Returning the correct HTTP status is not too important for human browsers but is a huge deal for search engines because when you’re indexing the Web you need to know which pages actually exist.
Curtain Up!
Well, hey, that was pretty painless. I was worried about having to move my Wordpress installation from one directory to another, but it went off very smoothly. Of course, then I had to do a bit of cleaning up, re-upload my images, and so on.
So here we are. 6+ months of work, on and off at times, have finally paid off.
The Search For…
So… I’ve got two options here, neither of them totally satisfactory.
1) Use the built-in Wordpress search function. It’s pretty basic, though you can install plugins to make it search pages as well as posts, and nicely highlight search terms on the results page. Pro: it only searches post/page content, and title (this annoyed me before). Which in fact is a bit of a con, because now I may want to search the comments.
Reinventing The Wheel
It started when my old camera conked out. No display in shooting mode, no images recorded. Ah, we had some good times these 4 years, but I guess nothing lasts forever. So I bought a new one. And then I started thinking more about photos, and the work I have to do to put them online.
