New Site Design Up and Running

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.

Referrer Message Plugin for WordPress

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/

Continued WordPress Post Numbering

13th June, 2009

My further experimentation led me to requiring the current number of a post which there is surprisingly little information about, so I ended up working something out from scratch.

I’ve posted it on the wordpress forum in case it proves useful for anyone else: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/245629

Update: Since this is now closed, I have included the code I made originally here:


function Get_Post_Number($postID){
$temp_query = $wp_query;
$postNumberQuery = new WP_Query('orderby=date&posts_per_page=-1');
$counter = 1;
$postCount = 0;
if($postNumberQuery->have_posts()) :
while ($postNumberQuery->have_posts()) : $postNumberQuery->the_post();
if ($postID == get_the_ID()){
$postCount = $counter;
} else {
$counter++;
}
endwhile; endif;
wp_reset_query();
$wp_query = $temp_query;
return $postCount;
}

WordPress Post Numbering

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.

Finished Matt Wreford Site

12th September, 2008

I have completed the production and implementation of a new site design for Matt Wreford, which can now be viewed on the website at http://www.mattwreford.com/, with only a few significant changes to my initial idea.

I have based the site on WordPress, using it as a Content Management System allowing for the quick adding of portfolio entries and amendments.

Essentially the pages have been used for each section with their own templates, and posts can be categorised so that they will fall into each of the three portfolio sections and with a bit of PHP will display in the right portfolio page.

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Experimenting With Drupal

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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Separating Posts from Pages in WordPress

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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WordPress and SMF Integration

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.