Anthology of Ideas

So, it has been quite a while since I posted on my own website. In the past 2 years, there have been what 2 posts? I’ve barely even looked at it just dropping in long enough to clear out some spam comments or deal with someone who thinks this is the perfect platform to be hateful on. Where have I been? Well, I’m in the process of moving all of my WordPress Plugins and content over to my business website at AaHa Creative and I’ve started a web development blog there.

New and shiny WordPress.org for a new and shiny version of WordPress. This website is officially not running beta software now, so yay! [geek]I upgraded after it was released for only 10 – 30 minutes. That has to be a record.[/geek]

Of the entire website the Dashboard is seen by administrators the most, but it is the hardest part of WordPress to customize. Well not anymore. This plugin allows you to add whatever you want to the Dashboard through PHP and HTML and allows you to even add Sidebar Widgets. You may also wipe the entire dashboard or individually remove some of the more irritating sections like the Dev news, Planet WordPress and the getting started section.

There are still some issues, but for the most part, everything seems pretty good.

1. The automatic upgrading is nice, but it still has a couple kinks in it: it says one or two plugins are at the latest version even though it says they aren’t, it died when upgrading wp-phpmyadmin but not until it deleted it, and it upgraded me to a bum copy of Redirection which wasted two hours of time while I thought that AWP was broken.
2. I still think the Admin panel is way too washed out. If it stays this way, one of my first tasks will be to release an Admin theme. I think everything has a cartoony feel to it, and it is way too bright. (As well as difficult to see.)
3. For some odd reason the Gravatars aren’t working even though they were on the test install.There is a reason you should allow at least 24 hours between hitting the save button and hitting the publishing. I just forgot to echo it.
4. Love the new media library. It alone will be worth the upgrade for some people. It auto generates galleries, and makes uploading and editing several pictures extremely easy.

Check out the gallery of screenshots below the fold.

On my home page and in my archives, I use a custom category template to display asides and news articles. This is very easy to do and it only takes a couple seconds of work to create custom category templates in any WordPress theme. The first step is to add the following to your current theme’s index.php loop after the line that looks like <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>, but before any other code.

One of my readers recently asked how I created my horizontal menu bar: the short answer is by mixing CSS and Javascript. The first step is to get WordPress to display the menu as a hierarchical list without a title. <?php wp_list_categories('sort_column=name&sort_order=asc&style=list&children=true&hierarchical=true&title_li=0'); ?> We then wrap this WordPress code in the following so we can style it. <div style="text-align:center;"> <ul id="menu" style="padding:0; margin:0;"> <?php wp_list_categories(&#039;sort_column=name&sort_order=asc&style=list&children=true&hierarchical=true&title_li=0&#039;); ?> </ul> </div> I added this to my header.php, but you can add it anywhere you want it to appear.

So, it has been quite a while since I posted on my own website. In the past 2 years, there have been what 2 posts? I’ve barely even looked at it just dropping in long enough to clear out some spam comments or deal with someone who thinks this is the perfect platform to be hateful on. Where have I been? Well, I’m in the process of moving all of my WordPress Plugins and content over to my business website at AaHa Creative and I’ve started a web development blog there.

New and shiny WordPress.org for a new and shiny version of WordPress. This website is officially not running beta software now, so yay! [geek]I upgraded after it was released for only 10 – 30 minutes. That has to be a record.[/geek]

Of the entire website the Dashboard is seen by administrators the most, but it is the hardest part of WordPress to customize. Well not anymore. This plugin allows you to add whatever you want to the Dashboard through PHP and HTML and allows you to even add Sidebar Widgets. You may also wipe the entire dashboard or individually remove some of the more irritating sections like the Dev news, Planet WordPress and the getting started section.

There are still some issues, but for the most part, everything seems pretty good.

1. The automatic upgrading is nice, but it still has a couple kinks in it: it says one or two plugins are at the latest version even though it says they aren’t, it died when upgrading wp-phpmyadmin but not until it deleted it, and it upgraded me to a bum copy of Redirection which wasted two hours of time while I thought that AWP was broken.
2. I still think the Admin panel is way too washed out. If it stays this way, one of my first tasks will be to release an Admin theme. I think everything has a cartoony feel to it, and it is way too bright. (As well as difficult to see.)
3. For some odd reason the Gravatars aren’t working even though they were on the test install.There is a reason you should allow at least 24 hours between hitting the save button and hitting the publishing. I just forgot to echo it.
4. Love the new media library. It alone will be worth the upgrade for some people. It auto generates galleries, and makes uploading and editing several pictures extremely easy.

Check out the gallery of screenshots below the fold.

On my home page and in my archives, I use a custom category template to display asides and news articles. This is very easy to do and it only takes a couple seconds of work to create custom category templates in any WordPress theme. The first step is to add the following to your current theme’s index.php loop after the line that looks like <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>, but before any other code.

One of my readers recently asked how I created my horizontal menu bar: the short answer is by mixing CSS and Javascript. The first step is to get WordPress to display the menu as a hierarchical list without a title. <?php wp_list_categories('sort_column=name&sort_order=asc&style=list&children=true&hierarchical=true&title_li=0'); ?> We then wrap this WordPress code in the following so we can style it. <div style="text-align:center;"> <ul id="menu" style="padding:0; margin:0;"> <?php wp_list_categories(&#039;sort_column=name&sort_order=asc&style=list&children=true&hierarchical=true&title_li=0&#039;); ?> </ul> </div> I added this to my header.php, but you can add it anywhere you want it to appear.