22nd September, 2009
So finally I’ve switched my website to the new design, with a hefty number of new bits and pieces being added so you’ll have to bear with me for a little while as things get sorted out. Some of the bigger changes include integrating twitter (for which I have had an unused account for years) as a sort of microblogging tool, separating my university work from my professional portfolio and integrating a ‘Related Posts’ system which I have had in mind for a long time but have only just discovered a brilliant plugin that does all the hard work for me.
Above is a shot of a couple of the images I’ve produced for new site features.
You can find that related posts plugin at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/similar-posts/. Another plugin by the same authors is one that shows a list of the most recent posts. In the old design I had this functionality hardcoded into the theme footer but now it can be done with a single line of PHP.
20th August, 2009
I was looking through some old del.icio.us tags when clicking on a link brought me to a blog that had implemented a specialised greeting message based on the referer. I know grabbing a referer isn’t that hard but having never seen it put to this use before I actually felt this was quite clever.
A link to the plugin: http://www.phoenixheart.net/wp-plugins/referrer-detector/
12th June, 2009
A plugin that will produce similar links to those found at the bottom of a google or flickr results page.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-page-numbers/
Unfortunately this wasn’t quite what I was after, since it works with the existing pagination system of Wordpress.
31st May, 2008
I have felt a little bit discontented with the way the Ocean Addict site has been going from an architectural point-of-view, particularly since adding the shop which is using the ancient system of OSCommerce and its flakey table-based layout and template system. The Ocean Addict site was always going to be an online store but initially started off as a related news and information blog with the view to expanding it. However my choice of using a blog as the core of the site (even one as expandable as Wordpress), and knowing very little about what open source CMS’s have to offer, is looking more and more limiting.
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16th April, 2008
I decided that what our wordpress-cross-CMS for Ocean Addict required was the ability to browse through the thousands of expected Pages (pages because of the fact they exist outside of the post timeline as a form of static content) forming the school listings via the inbuilt category system. This was easily achievable by creating a page template specifically for displaying a school listing with the Comments and Categories shown and by using the useful plugin Page Category Plus for replicating the Category selection interface in the admin (I was already aware that this was possible since Pages are simply Posts that are treated differently but still have all the same mySQL fields).
While this side of things worked exactly as expected it threw up a unique issue I hadn’t considered.
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29th March, 2008
As we continue to develop the Ocean Addict website it was decided that the forum needed to be as robust and powerful as possible so this meant installing additional forum software, in the form of a Simple Machines Forum. Once this was done, clearly there needed to be as much integration for users as possible, from logging in to styling the user interface, so I set about searching for a method of bridging Wordpress and SMF.
I quickly found http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-smf-a-simplemachines-bridge/, which seemed ideal. That is until after diligently following the installation instructions the plugin caused the entire site to break. Fortunately Wordpress’s plugin system can be rescued by simply deleting the offending plugin.
Searching for much longer wielded a solution based on the first. The stuff that can be found at http://www.earthorbit.com/opensource/ DOES work and works well.
15th March, 2008
For the Ocean Addict website I have been looking into open source solutions to creating a form of CMS to link together the main features now wanted for the site. An obvious choice might be something like Joomla! or Drupal but we have already got together the blog frontpage and a store, so instead the site is heading for Wordpress. I’ve heard of WP being used before as a CMS, it is known for its flexibility but until now I have never considered using it as anything more as a blog.
An excellent page bringing together a whole range of resources to do just this can be found at:
http://www.graphicdesignblog.co.uk/wordpress-as-a-cms-content-management-system/
Before now I have experimented with the nextgen gallery wordpress system and the wordpress simple forum.
20th February, 2008
I am currently working on the Ocean Addict website now alongside several other projects, for which we have decided to use Wordpress as a form of CMS and integrate it with other features such as e-commerce software, a gallery and a forum.
Here is a preview of my current direction of design…
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