Stuff of interest to me for WordPress developers
How-To
Setting up a multi-blog installation
Jan 4th
The CASL Ambassadors web site is actually a collection of WordPress blogs – the main site plus one for each of six age group teams. When I initially set it up I tried using WordPress-MU but my hosting solution wasn’t capable for MU’s requirements. Then I tried a plugin called WP-Hive which allows a collection of blogs to share some common infrastructure. Wp-Hive looked promising but I ran into some concerns which kept me from using it.
Ultimately I ended up setting up a separate blog for each site and hoped to come back to it at some point. That point was a couple weeks ago when I decided to do some maintenance on the sites. I ended up using the main installation as a parent and linked (using Unix symbolic links) all of the sub-domain sites back to parent. The only exception was the wp-content directory which is a real directory (so uploads can be unique) but within wp-content I linked back to the parent’s themes and plugins.
This worked pretty well – if I install a plugin or theme for the main site it is available for all of the sub-domain sites and when I upgrade WordPress, all of the sub-domain sites are upgraded as well. Once I got this running, I wanted to share the users across all blogs.
After several attempts and numerous Google searches, I ended up following the directions in this thread and this thread and got everything to work. I don’t particularly care for having to modify one of the core WordPress files since it will go away the next time I update WordPress but none of the other solutions I tried worked.
Trying out WordPress Facebook Connect plugin
Dec 1st
I have been doing some testing with the WordPress Facebook Connect plugin. There are a couple sites I work with, particularly our swim team web site, MacDolphins.org, where I need users to login and add data to the site. Each year when we do swim team registration I get lots of questions about how to register, forgotten usernames and passwords, etc. With the popularity of Facebook, I am thinking that leveraging Facebook login credentials could make things a lot easier for me and our swim team parents.
As a test, I have installed it on the site I am putting together for my youngest daughter’s soccer team (CASL Sharks) to see how it works. For the most part, I am impressed – it pretty much works as advertised. I was able to login using my Facebook login and once my user was added to the WordPress user tables, I could change my permissions to allow my Facebook user id to post. I still need to do some work to support Facebook Connect for comments but the instructions look pretty straight forward. I think this would work well for the NCLTC and NCLUG sites as well although Facebook Connect requires PHP5 and those sites are hosted on a PHP4 based server so I’ll have to sort that out.
Flickr-Gallery Plugin – good stuff!
Nov 22nd
I use Flickr to host my photos and I’ve always wanted a better way to present them on WordPress blogs and this weekend I think I found it. Flickr-Gallery is a great plugin. It is easy to set up and use and it integrates well with my theme. It has a nice selection of short code options.
The only thing I use which is missing is the ability to link or preferably, display, a slide show. I shoot a lot of pictures of our kids activities (skateboarding, soccer, basketball, swim team, etc.) and sharing them as a Flickr slide show is something I do frequently.
I found a solution to the missing slide show by using the Light Window plugin in conjunction with the Flickr URL for the slide show I am interested in presenting.
Header Image Options in LEGO Theme
Sep 17th
I have been working on a re-write of the Sandbox LEGO WordPress theme. It is taking a lot longer than I thought it would, mostly because I have made the problem more complicated than I initially thought it would be.
One of the main things I wanted to offer in this theme was the ability to choose a color scheme from an pre-set offering of about 8-10 choices. This wasn’t too hard, I had done some similar in the original Sandbox Soccer theme.
As I worked on it I decided it would be nice to allow the user to define what the header should look like including their own image. WordPress offers the ability to upload and use a custom theme header but this didn’t do quite what I wanted. I decided to let the user choose a header image from the media library. But what if the user wants multiple header images? Hmmm. This problem could get very complicate very quickly. I decided to constrain the problem by providing the ability to define up to three (3) header images: Left, center, and right. Doing this would support the 3-4 sites I expect to use this theme on (my own CarolinaTrainBuiders.com site, NCLUG, NCLTC, and ILTCO).
Now that I knew what I wanted, how to implement it. Simply showing the image options on a Theme Options page could potentially result in an enormous page. I mentioned jQuery Accordion in a prior post, dividing the various options into sections using the Accordion made sense and was pretty straightforward once I upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4.
Once the Accordion was working I decided I wanted an elegant way to select the images. Since this effort is a hobby and I largely do projects likes this to learn something, I decided I wanted to use a drag and drop mechanism to select the images. Again, jQuery to the rescue, namely the jQuery draggable and jQuery droppable plugins. In particular, the Simple Photo Manager demo was very close to what I had envisioned.
It has taken me a little while, mostly because I haven’t had a lot of time to work on it but I finally have a pretty slick theme options page working where the header images can be selected from the media library using drag and drop. I am by no means a jQuery guru but I have learned a fair amount working this problem out. The code I have isn’t ideal and I’ll continue to refine it but it is working so I can continue to develop the theme. Once I get it running and released I will go back and clean up the jQuery code. For now, getting it working and doing what I wanted was the primary task.
What happened to ColorBlender.com?
Sep 1st
Another one of the resources I use seems to have crapped out. ColorBlender.com is still online but the site doesn’t work any more. It is still possible to browse through some of the old palettes but it isn’t possible to create a new one. I liked ColorBlender, it came up with some nice color schemes and was easy to use.
Since it wasn’t working, I went in search for a replacement and found a couple interesting sites.
- WebSiteTips.com: Colour Scheme Chooser
- WebSiteTips.com: Color Match ReMix Color Scheme Tool
- WebSiteTips.com: Color Blender Tool
Of the three, I like the Color Match Remix Color Scheme Tool the best. For a color neophyte like myself, these sort of resources are really useful.
Another resource I refer to pretty frequently is the Elementik’s Web design tools and resources I use page. This page has links to all sorts of cool Javascript solutions, CSS tricks, color design resources, and more.
WPMU – easier said than done …
Mar 4th
Over the last couple of days I have been playing around with WordPress MU (aka WPMU), the multi-user, mult-blog version of WordPress. It has been on my “to checkout” list for a while but I haven’t had a compelling reason to do so until now.
I was asked to help set up some blogs for a group of soccer teams that are traveling to Europe later this year after doing one for my daughter’s team (one of the teams). This seemed like a good opportunity to try out WPMU since I’d also like to do it for my wp-SwimTeam plugin and make it available to swim teams as a hosted service.
Downloading and installing WPMU was pretty straight forward but getting it to work with sub-domain mode blogs turned out to be a challenge. I have concluded that without the ability to edit the httpd.conf file, it isn’t possible to make it work. I did manage to get the sub-directory mode working but that isn’t what I need for the soccer team project.
So for now, I am going to abandon WPMU and set up a series of regular WordPress blogs, one for each team. I am also looking at wp-Hive to help with this.