the singularity of being and nothingness
Posts tagged WordPress
Migrating a Custom Blog (or blogs…) to WordPress
Jun 11th
When I first got into web development, one of my first projects was to create a custom blog for myself. Apart from the sheer necessity of needing a blog at the time, I embarked on this coding journey because I had read somewhere that developing a blog would provide a good introduction to the nitty-gritty of application design.
While this wasn’t 100% accurate, it also was not terrifically far from the truth. Through many struggles and achievements, I finally wound up with my own custom blog, complete with commenting system, RSS delivery, and eventually automatic posting to Twitter.
This modest blog served me pretty well for a few months, but I quickly outgrew it. I found myself pouring precious hours into little development projects to try to get it to do cool stuff that I came across in other, more robust systems.
Eventually, however, I ran out of time and motivation. First, the continual development stopped. Then, out of total laziness, important things like bug fixes and comment-security fell to the wayside. While I still loved to blog, the sheer effort of posting (my interface was a bit clunky…) was a big hindrance, so the posts became quite sparse.
Then I got my iPhone. More >
Did I Ever Mention that PHP is Dumb?
Jun 10th
I do not like PHP. Period. Sorry. I find it clunky and it makes me irritable. Sure, it's free, but so what? There's a lot of free things that I don't like (like the flu, for example).
What's my beef? Tonight, I launched my first successful WordPress integration. For the testing phase, I had the installation in a sub-folder off the main site. Everything worked great.
But finally I moved it to the root. Guess what? PHP got angry at me. On nearly every page I received this error:
"Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at blah, blah blah)."
Apparently this is common error, caused by whitespace. Really? Stupid. I can't believe that PHP can't process a file with whitespace…just seems really, well, dumb.
But the kicker is this: nothing changed between moving the files from my testing folder to the root! For whatever reason, PHP didn't care about it when it was in the testing folder, but then changed its mind when I moved the files. Again, dumb.
Anyway, the fix was really simple. Turns out that there were two lines of whitespace in my wp-config.php file, whitespace which I didn't put there (thanks WordPress).
Urghh. More >
Woot! My First WordPress Plugin!
May 29th
Over the last week and a half, I have been working with an old co-worker of mine on a project that he started about a month (or so) ago: searchwebjobs.com. This site is a pretty cool job listings site that is really easy to browse for jobs.
In brainstorming how to make the site better, I suggested that we create a WordPress plugin that would allow others (presumably, CSS galleries…) to grab a feed of our jobs and display them on their site.
So, grabbing my PHP 5 manual (and dusting it off…), I set to work. Fortunately, I have had some recent exposure to WordPress, so I felt reasonably sure that something could be done.
In all honesty, I couldn't be more impressed with WordPress' support for plugins. Consider this: it took me–a complete idiot at PHP–only 3 hours to program then entire plugin from nearly scratch. Not bad.
The beauty of WordPress' plugin support–IMO–is the default database that is so easily exposed. Instead of having to create stupid PHP connections, that stuff already exists, so all you have to do is basically write SQL. Plus, there are a few native functions to WordPress that allow you to use a row More >
First Crack at WordPress
May 3rd
So normally I REALLLY prefer custom development to canned solutions. Sure, the pre-built software peices are nice in that they provide out-of-the-box solutions: but the problem is that the solution is not always very useful. End soap-box.
Today I began my first-ever implementation of a site design to WordPress. I've used WordPress for blogging before, but I've never really messed with it from a design standpoint.
My initial impression is that it's okay. Just as with Blogger and other similar services, the plugging in of functionality is sensible enough (although Blogger's tag-based version seems a bit more intuitive…). There are fifteen-billion functions available for getting dates, user scopes, etc. So that's all fine and good.
I guess my biggest objection–and this is true of all software like this–is that styling the default WordPress widgets is a PAIN. There's a lot of un-classed generated code that one has to wade through to get down to very mundane–yet extremely design-important elements like <a> tags. What's more is that these default plugins appear to live outside of the "themes" that one can build. So if one is not interested in traversing several levels of inheritance just to apply a different color to a "Most Recent More >