Comments on: Revamp

By: What Lies Within: Of Calendars, Hidden Data, and Hacked Templates at The Fish Wrapper

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:50:07 +0000

[...] blogged in the past about my endless DTLT Web Site Redesign project. And I’ve committed myself to regularly blogging about what I’m doing as part of that [...]

By: WP as C(ontent)MS: Square Peg, Round Hole Anyone? at The Fish Wrapper

WP as C(ontent)MS: Square Peg, Round Hole Anyone? at The Fish Wrapper — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:09:09 +0000

[...] me thinking about the possibilities on this front. Then, in November, I turned my attention back to revamping the DTLT Web site in Wordpress and using a bunch of plugins to make the CMS thing work. At the time, I settled on [...]

By: DTLT Revamp: Custom Fields Are Your Friends at The Fish Wrapper

DTLT Revamp: Custom Fields Are Your Friends at The Fish Wrapper — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 17:00:25 +0000

[...] in a series that I’m writing about my experiments with redesigning the DTLT Web site. You can read the introduction here. You can see all of the posts in this series [...]

By: Really Simple?

Really Simple? — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 06:43:01 +0000

[...] Wordpress and RSS sites, and looking at ways that Wordpress installs may or may not be integrated into other LMS / CMS systems. One seemingly small but significant thing I’m coming to appreciate the utility of simple [...]

By: Gardner

Gardner — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:14:11 +0000

Your timing is impeccable. I’m trying to ramp up a site for the Academy for Teaching and Learning here at Baylor and it’ll have to be developed in WordPress (for all sorts of reasons, including my own preference). Your web and writing chops are exactly what I need to inspire me and nudge me along. Looking forward to a great journey. Thanks!

By: Martha

Martha — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:12:36 +0000

Wow, thanks for all the great advice Alan.

If I’d been a bit more on the ball, I would have remembered that I had bookmarked this post of yours back in February: http://cogdogblog.com/2008/02/14/wordpressing-dissected/. I remember thinking at the time that you were describing some techniques that might be the key to the empire in terms of what I was imagining for the DTLT site. Your post reminded me of it, so now I have another great resource to go back to.

I’m really new to mucking around in templates (and did I mention I really don’t know a lick of php?), so the learning curve is a bit steep right now. But I have been amazed at how easy some of this is. I discovered the WP template hierarchy, and that helped a lot. I think I know what you mean about just getting the names of the templates right. Once I do that, the rest is kind of “baked in.”

I also discovered template tags yesterday which was very cool — lots of dynamic content that can just be dropped into The Loop.

In terms of custome fields, have you ever used them to “structure” your posts or pages? I’m imagining breaking content into fields like “description,” “screenshot,” “link,” and “contact,” for example. And then building custom templates to finesse the display around these fields. In my mind, this would be better than just big chunks of content. But, I’m not sure if what I’m imagining is overkill.

I’ll definitely spend sometime really perusing the pachyderm and virtualworlds sites. I’ve looked at them before, of course, but never with quite this eye. . .

By: jmcclurken

jmcclurken — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 02:57:30 +0000

Martha,
This is great, and not just for DTLT. Sue and I have been brainstorming (and Sue’s done more) for our new history/AMST department site along these lines. Subscriptions, multiple calendars, multiple lines of content: these are all key to what we see as the future of a truly connected academic department. Expect us to steal liberally from (…uh, I mean “collaborate with”) your work here.

By: Martha

Martha — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 02:48:53 +0000

@Alan I have rescued you from Akismet purgatory. I have no idea how you ended up there, but consider yourself released.

And thanks for the great response -=- there’s lots to mull over there, which I plan to do once I’ve gotten a good night’s sleep. I need the synapses firing.

By: Alan Levine

Alan Levine — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 01:28:37 +0000

Hey! I left a long comment last night! Am I trapped in spam filters? I said nice things and offered a lot of suggestions. Please dig me out of the spam hole….

@Leslie M-B: Wow that is a great site, why apologize? It is very clean and would take some source code peeking to ID it as WordPress. Yes, getting forms to work inside a WP flow is tough as you wrestle with its own logic. I’ve done a bunch of these by rolling my own PHP forms, but you can use the WP first two lines of its index.php file to access the functions to call the header, sidebar, etc, style sheet; you insert your own code inside, and it does not execute through the WordPress engine.

By: Is Flutter a CCK for WordPress? | D'Arcy Norman dot net

Is Flutter a CCK for WordPress? | D'Arcy Norman dot net — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:29:37 +0000

[...] a thread through some blog posts this morning – I started at The Reverend’s post about Martha’s documentation of her hacking on WPMU, including a description of a WordPress plugin I hadn’t heard of before – Flutter. Damn. The [...]