by ·Comments Off on This is why you never…

This is why you never upgrade a “live” site, especially when you’re dealing with multiple softwares that need to interact together.

WP 3.1 rolled out on Wednesday, and silly me, thinking it’d be fine to upgrade, did so on both t-gk.net and cans-crew.com.  t-gk.net was fine (and why shouldn’t it be?), but cC went into a tailspin.  After multiple hours of frustration, I finally got cC back to basic functionality again, but it’s still missing some key features.

The integration (WP-United) redefines several functions that until WP 3.1, had been in a file that was rarely called.  3.1 moved those into an “always active” file, creating PHP Fatal errors.  Not good.  As a temporary work around, I wound up just renaming the files in WP-United.  It’s at least restored template functionality, but the user-integration method is somewhat borked for the time-being.  As a solution, I *think* that if I comment out the offending functions in WP, all will be well.

This is what happens when you use a piece of software that’s not actively developed right now.  Officially, the last “stable” release of WPU is compatible with WP 2.9 and phpBB 3.07-pl1.  The dev has been disappeared for over 6 months.

I’m thinking at the present time that I should take a serious look at pulling several pieces of his  software and merging them with another one out there that’s missing them.  I don’t feel 100% comfortable doing it, but I think it’s going to have to be done. =(

by ·Comments Off on New Site Rolled Out

I’ve been remiss in updating the rollout of the new site design.  It’s been a rather busy week here, fixing up some of the problems that I’ve run across and doing some other things.

The design is for my gaming community, cC (formerly’ cAn’s Crew).  I’ll spare anyone *not* interested in the gory details by posting everything below the cut.  Continue reading

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 ·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.