by ·Comments Off on WordPress & other CMS Systems

WordPress is a great CMS, no doubt about it.  But unfortunately, some of it’s core functionality is lacking, even when using every plugin known to man.  For instance, integrating a phpBB forum into WordPress is trying.  While WP-United solves that to some degree, it’s a one-man dev shop, and he’s been prone to take long breaks away.  His latest plugin (0.8.5) was released long before WP 3.0, and while it seems to work ok, still has some errors.

I’ve been struggling to integrate MediaWiki, phpBB3, and WordPress together.  Basically, WordPress is going to run the functionality of the overall site, including the template.  This is for my gaming community, and we’ve had phpBB and MediaWiki running together for quite some time.  Unfortunately, they’ve always run disjointedly, meaning there was never any real integration between the home page, the forums, and the wiki.

Sadly, Mediawiki won’t integrate with the WP-United setup.  It’s left me very frustrated the last few days.  The idea of adding a few lines of code that call up the WP header may work for WP & Mediawiki alone, but not with WP, Mediawiki, and WP-United.  Maybe phpBB4 will fix that, but that’s easily 12 months away.

The elegant solution, it seems, is to just use the idea of the integration instructions and use another Wiki package.  Seems I’ve found that solution with WikkaWiki, although it remains to be seen if I’ll be able to get the data inside our MediaWiki install and convert it to WikkaWiki.  I hope that I can.

by ·2 Comments

Since I last worked on the halftonreviews design, I really haven’t done much web work (or anything of note that went through to completion).  I’ve started and stopped some different designs, but never really had a focus for anything major.  I did some minor tweaking to a theme for our local alumni association, but nothing I’d consider earth-breaking or shattering.  Probably a total of 45 minutes.

My friend Daniel has developed some modeling software called CurveExpert.  He’s had it for a few years, and this was his site to sell it originally – www.curveexpert.net/original.  It’s all manually done html, low on graphics, and *gasp* ugly.  He didn’t even have a proper domain!  He asked me when he started working on the update to the software what he should do in terms of webhosting, as well as site design.  I suggested that he move to WordPress, PHPBb (for user forums), and get a VPS similar to me (he’s fairly decently versed in Linux.  So he dove right in.  He used the default WordPress theme initially, but went shopping for a theme for the “final release” of his software.

So, about a week ago, he wanted to get the forums to match up with the main site.  I told him that I’d take care of it for him.  I just finished up last night.  Check out the finished product at http://www.curveexpert.net and http://www.curveexpert.net/forums.

It was a good exercise, because I’m going to wind up doing something similar with my gaming community’s site.  We changed providers and the old webmaster has stepped aside.  He builds sites using Rails (a newer method of coding), and I can’t seem to get it to run on our new host.  Not to mention we had a very disjointed feel between all sections of our site.  So, I’m going to start integrating things together, and needed the experience of editing a forum template.  Hopefully this will go somewhat easier than the last one!

by ·Comments Off on I wish they made it easier…

I spent the better portion of an hour and change this morning grabbing most of my photos off of the livejournal gallery and moving them to my newly established gallery here.  (Nevermind how much of a pain that was to get working).  You’d think that as big as LJ is, they’d make it easier to get the pictures in a simple download rather than having to go to each full-size one and saving it to the hard drive.  That’s what really took so long.  Getting them here once they were downloaded… pretty easy.  Continue reading

by ·Comments Off on A New Addiction

Since shipping off HalfTon 1.0 to the twins over the weekend, I’ve spent the last few days getting even deeper into the intricacies that are WordPress Theming.  I think it’s safe to say at this point that I’m addicted.

Since Saturday, I’ve done quite a bit of work to the theme for their site.  It’s enough to me that I’ll wind up actually increasing version numbers. =)

I’ll provide a laundry list of changes:

  • Internalized most of the Java to use the WP-packaged binaries (you mean I don’t need to include over 50k of scripts?! No wai!)
  • Re-formatted the post comments area
  • Created an additional admin area to include “regular” post data that they generate – Restaurant Info, post thumbnail, etc.
  • Created a theme options page where they can change the variables for the links.

Those last two items are huge.  As I’ve been discovering, the theme options are what really makes a theme stand out, especially in the “premium” category, where it’s about the only way to distinguish yourself against the competition.   There are some really amazing theme option pages out there.  And some others that truly suck.

All of this work has led me to want to start in on another theme – but right now, I’m kind of lacking in the “graphical inspiration” category.  I suppose that’s what I get for spending too much time on the code aspects of my reading and not the design aspect.  =/

BTW, if you see any random theme changes around here, don’t despair.  I’m just looking through the various themes to get an idea of popular theme options.  I’ll be back to the regular BlackPress theme here soon.

by ·Comments Off on It’s alive!

Just a quick note – Matt & Dan have gone active with the new design over at halftonreviews.com.  Head on over there and check it out.  =)

It’s required a bit of extra work on Matt’s part to get it working (editing a lot of post info).  But it’s there.  =)

The site is heavily enabled with javascript (to hide some elements and make others “pop”).  I was going to actually add a few other things, one cool one would have been a script that would automatically add in a google map based on any location info within the page.  The problem though, would come when the page itself had multiple cities on it (like the list of all posts).  Bit of a pain given their setup, but would have been workable.