I wanted to use Wordpress because it was a good way to provide the editor with an easy-to-use WYSIWYG interface without sucking up a ton of dev time.  We have dozens of sites like this one and without Wordpress mods I would likely spend most of my time working on them.  This web site had to accomplish a few things:

1. It couldn’t feel too much like a blog.
2. It had to provide a way of archiving old posts.
3. It had to provide a reliable, intuitive way for readers to access these archives.

Because archiving was important, I didn’t want to use pages to display the information in this publication.  One of the major limitations of pages in Wordpress is that a page, although technically a post, doesn’t allow for logical scalability. You create a page called “Recipes” and you add a bunch of recipes to it.  Say down the line you want to add a bunch more.  In a page situation, you would edit the original and add more recipes.  What happens when you have 3,000 recipes?  Your page is enormous, it probably won’t load, and you’ll probably run into problems editing it.  Fixing this down the line can be a real pain in the butt.

The best way to do it is using categories and a little Wordpress fancy dancing using the WP_Query(); function.  I’ll use an example from this publication.  Hudson Monthly has a “Making the Scene” section every month where a photographer goes to a local event and shoots pictures of the event and the people involved.  There is one of these per issue and it is monthly.  Knowing this, my objectives were as follows:

1. Show an excerpt of the latest “Making the Scene” story on the main page with a link to the full version.
2. Link to the latest “Making the Scene” story from every page on the site.
3. Link to a list of stories from this section from the main page.

For the sake of archiving everything on the site, every single entry had to be a blog post.  The only page on the site would be the contact page because that would rarely (if ever) change and needed no archive.  Therefore, I set up a bunch of new categories, one of which was Making the Scene.  I also went into the permalink settings and set my category permalinks to be /section/category-name to be more indicative of a print product and not a blog.

For each of my objectives, I needed a query.  Luckily, the wonderful Wordpress API has a function to handle this baked in.

<?php $mts_single = new WP_Query('category_name=making-the-scene&showposts=1'); ?>

This line of code drags only the latest post from the making-the-scene category.  Creating a loop with this query is easy, too.

<?php while ($mts_single->have_posts()) : $mts_single->the_post(); ?>
  <!-- All of your stuff goes in here -->
<?php endwhile; ?>

Placing this on the index page gave me the ability to drag the title, excerpt and permalink from the post.

<?php while ($mts_single->have_posts()) : $mts_single->the_post(); ?>
  <h2><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
  <p><?php the_excerpt(); ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>

Objective one complete.  For objective two, I used the same query on the header.php page to make a dynamic nav button using the permalink.

<?php while ($mts_single->have_posts()) : $mts_single->the_post(); ?>
  <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">Making The Scene</a>
<?php endwhile; ?>

Objective two was complete.  Objective three was a piece of cake.  Because these are all categories, there is a page set up to display posts from those categories.  Remember, I changed the permalink structure to display section in the URL path, so in order to link to all of the Making the Scene posts, I had to add a link on the main page to http://www.hudsonmonthly.com/section/making-the-scene.  Google will love that URL, too.

Looking back on all of this, it becomes clear how you can use Wordpress to create a newspaper web site quickly and easily.  You can use categories to and the WP_Query(); function to segregate content by category on your site and manipulate it in an almost countless number of ways.  With web development being such an expensive venture, I wouldn’t be surprised if you begin to see more and more newspapers moving to Wordpress as a CMS.  These ones already have.

http://www.rockymountainindependent.com/
http://www.stabroeknews.com/
http://www.tabletmag.com/
http://www.indenvertimes.com/

Wednesday was volleyball playoffs.  In my team’s first session, we came in 4th place in the league.  It was good enough to get us a first round bye in the playoffs, which was pretty cool if you ask me.  Well, problem is we lost in the second round.  Double elimination.  This week is a big one.

Friday I had my “personal training” appointment at my new gym.    I use the term personal training loosely because all he really did was walk me around the gym, show me where stuff is and briefly discuss how to lift weights properly.  That is my favorite at a gym.  You’ll see some dispropotional kid pumping dumbells like a rabbit on methamphetamines and giving you that eye like “I just lifted more than you.”  Sure dude.  I could slam a plane into the ground and survive, but it doesn’t mean I know how to land.  Anyway, it isn’t a competition, and that is the mindset I’m trying to keep as I move forward.  Don’t look at what everyone else is lifting.  Look in the mirror.  If you’re happy with that, nothing else matters.  That isn’t to say I’m unhappy with the way I am now, but making the transition from a physically demanding 50+ hour/week kitchen job to a sedentary desk job had just started to show on my gut.  Figured I’d nip that one in the bud before I woke up 30 and overweight.

Saturday was house hunting.  I’ll spare you the details because I could write for 36 hours about how that went.  Here are the bulletpoints:

1. Most of the houses we looked at were overpriced.  I’m getting used to the fact that negotiations might involve brass knuckles.
2. People in Kent are messy.
3. Often times people that attempt to make changes to a home have no clue what they are doing.
4. It is rare where you find a house that is exactly as you’d want it.

‘Nuff said.

Today was a lazy day.  Did a little cardio, worked on the Wordpress store and went to dinner with the family.

This week’s goals:

1. Start prepping the car for Import Alliance
   • Full interior detail
   • Clean door jambs
   • Fix sound system wiring
   • Buy t-bolt clamps for turbo piping
   • Purchase any other hardware that may be necessary
2. Finish new Dixcom.com site
3. Finish Wordpress Store
   • Posts in header on pages
   • Graphic fixes
   • Finish footer
   • Finalize CSS
   • Test, test, test, test, test

Have a good week!

Progress: 35% Complete

This is my first foray into modding the WP Framework theme. This is also my first attempt at making use of the wp-e-commerce plugin and my first attempt at adding another loop to the mix. Lots of firsts in this project. Oh, and don’t go thinking that the pixelated logo is a failed attempt at being a trailblazer. I’m trying to keep it neutral until launch.

Thus far WP Framework has proven to be a bit more complicated than Starkers, but it may very well be for good reason. It seems like the packaged CSS files that come with the theme account for a lot of the discrepencies between IE and Firefox. I have run into very few issues thus far with browser compatibility. Before it was a nightmare, but my novice-level CSS skills play into that, I’m sure. I also think it is awesome that it came with a container-style div. No more Blueprint implementation. Rock!

The WP E-commerce plugin breaks the drag-and-drop widget interface in Wordpress 2.8.1, which is a real bummer. I’m hoping they iron that kink out before this site is ready to launch. I haven’t had much of a chance to play with the interface itself as of yet, but from what I can see in the admin portion of the site it all looks quite intuitive and easy to use, which is exactly what you’re looking for with a site like this. I’m not sure I’d be comfortable using it for a company with a large catalog and a lot of traffic, but for something like a botique tuning shop its lightweight, cost-effective… a good choice all around.

As for the loop, I’ll first say that Wordpress calls the while statement that pulls posts from the database “The Loop.” The goal was to split the blog entries in two. The top of the page was to have three boxes with an image and a line of text. These had to be dynamic (they could be changed without any hard coding). Because of the nature of the project it was unnecessary to display categories on the site. I am actually using categories to filter blog posts and change CSS instead. First, I wrote the CSS for the top boxes.

.topbox {
display: inline-block;
background-color: white;
vertical-align: top;
border: 1px dotted black;
margin: 18px 5px 5px 5px;
font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-weight: bold;
font-size: 0.9em;
}

.topbox p {
margin: 5px;
}

.topbox p img {
margin: 0px 0px 5px 0px;
border: 1px dotted red;
}

Not the best look, but its something to work with. Now it was time to add the loop and the HTML to header.php. I consulted Wordpress’s documentation to get this piece of code to start a basic loop.

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<!-- do stuff ... -->
<?php endwhile; ?>

Turns out that the documentation left out an endif after that endwhile statement.  It should read…

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<!-- do stuff ... -->
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>

Now, I wanted to filter by category.  The way to do this is to throw an extra line of code in after the second line…

<?php if (!in_category('TopBox')) continue; ?>

This says “if the post isn’t in the TopBox category, skip it and cycle back through the loop.”  The end user can make a new post, insert a 190×110 pixel image and a line of text and as long as the category is set to TopBox it will automatically kick into rotation at the top of the site.  Good way to add a type of feature section to your blog.  Now, this doesn’t account for the situation in which you have 4 posts in that category.  That would blow my page up.  I’ll jump that hurdle in the next session.

Next steps: kill the white borders on those nav buttons, figure out my mouseover CSS issues, figure out how to get those top boxes to appear on pages, figure a way to place the shopping cart widget on the sidebar.  Figure, figure, figure.

Patton and The Kingdom come from Netflix tomorrow, so it may be a couple days before I do any more work on it. Can you believe I’ve never seen Patton?