SonicChicken blog

I’m thinking about using the free statcounter service on my site, but it requires that I add a little bit of javascript to each page. If I was running a single theme, I could probably find all the appropriate </body> tags and just paste in the statcounter code. But I’m trying to support multiple themes; besides, where’s the fun in cutting and pasting a bunch of code? Also, what if I need to change the statcounter code for some reason? So I think the Right Thing to do here is come up with a plugin for the wp_footer action which will insert some user-specified code, (in this case, my statcounter javascript). I haven’t found a plugin for statcounter, so I’ll be searching for a generic footer plugin. If I can’t find anything, I guess I’ll have to roll my own.

Nothing’s been going on here since I’ve been busy hacking up Central Valley NTrak, my model railroad site. It’s now a full WordPress site–all content is managed by WP. I learned a few things about Pages (note the capital “P”) and hierarchal categories which I thought I would share. (Or at least write down, so I don’t have to re-learn them the hard way!)

The site is using a modified version of BB Iverson’s theme, Spirit, which has a few non-post Pages linked from the header. Creating the pages sounded pretty easy, so I jumped in. I got the pages created okay, but I couldn’t view them–I kept getting 404 errors whenever I tried to browse cvntrak.org/archives/. I thought perhaps I had set the page template incorrectly, or perhaps I should have titled the page “archives” instead of “Archives”. I tried all kinds of things, to no avail. Eventually I found a reference to “the default ‘pretty’ permalink format”, so I double-checked that I had indeed set these up correctly, and found my problem–I had turned off write access to my .htaccess file after I got the permalink format set initially, and there were a whole bunch of new rewrite rules to be added for the new Pages I had written. I played with this a little bit more, and it seems like you need to visit the Options/Permalinks page and hit “Update permalink structure” whenever you create a new Page. I tried leaving .htaccess writable, then creating a Page, then viewing it, and I always got 404’s for pages created after the most recent permalink update. I don’t like leaving this file writable, so I’ll just cut-and-paste if I ever need to change the rewrite rules again.

“Spirit” has a category list in the left sidebar, generated by wplistcats(). I set up hierarchal categories for this site, with a couple of top-level “container” categories. Then I made the first post and filed it under the child categories, published it and viewed the home page and wplistcats showed… nothing! I futzed around with this for a while and finally I made a post in one of the top-level categories. Voila! All of a sudden I can see the category hierarchy in the sidebar, at least for all children of the top-level category with a post. I have to play with this some more to see exactly when it breaks. I’m not sure if this is a bug, or maybe I don’t completely understand how wplistcats() is supposed to work.

I’ve got tags working in “Sharepoint like”, but the tags list (left column) looks pretty ugly. The CSS for this theme doesn’t work well with the output of listtags(), since the CSS sort of expects category listings to contain only anchors (<a>), while listtags() outputs an anchored tag name followed by the article count as plain text.

This is a bummer. I really like the Sharepoint theme, and I much prefer tags over categories. I may have to hack the tags plugin to add a function to list the anchored tags without article counts, or perhaps add another parameter to the list_tags() function to control this.

It’s getting late, I think that’s enough theme hacking for one night. I’ll look at this with fresh eyes in the morning.

I hacked up Journalized-Blue’s index.php to replace the category listing with Felix Wong’s tags plugin. I still need to grep the rest of this theme for categories and fix them as well. Then I’ll have to see which of the rest of my themes are worth the effort. (I guess it’s not that tough to add tags support, it’s just a matter of finding all the places where categories are listed in all of the theme php files.)

I should probably also be a good citizen and post the modified themes.

I went searching for a new theme yesterday. Don’t get me wrong–the default theme is very nice, easy to read, etc., but I just couldn’t bring myself to use the “just another WordPress blog” theme. Also, I wanted a theme that took advantage of the full width of the browser window.

The WRC Theme Viewer is an awesome tool for checking out a huge number of available themes, and I went through every single one of them. (Took me a while, even with a fat pipe at home.) I found about 20 themes that had feature(s) I liked and/or looked nice. I’ll list all ~20 of them, along with my impressions, in another post. But the two that I decided to install are Elvgren and Borderline Chaos.

I love Denis Somar’s Elvgren theme. The layout suits me, especially the article appearance. The font styles and colors for the articles are very well-chosen, IMO. The Elvgren prints are gorgeous, but they are also the reason I chose not to make this my default theme–the bandwidth required for this theme could be a killer for some users. (Until very recently I had been stuck with a 33kb/s max pipe, and bandwidth considerations are still very important to me!) But since I like this theme so much, I installed a theme switcher plugin so that my readers (all 2 of them) can choose their preferred theme. (More on this below.) This theme worked great for me “right out of the box”, so I haven’t tweaked it (yet).

I chose Marianne’s Borderline Chaos as the site default. I love the bold, striking look of it! And the theme overhead (wrt bandwidth) is almost nil. There were a few things I needed to tweak on this theme. On the nit-picky side, I didn’t like the way my blog title wrapped, so I made that box a fixed width instead of using a width percentage. But the major problem I had with this theme was lack of a “Site Admin” link. Perhaps I’m a complete moron and there’s a knob for this somewhere, but I didn’t find it upon cursory inspection. So I added a “Meta” sidebox and put the appropriate stuff inside it. This caused me to run out of box styles, and instead of doing the simple thing (adding another sidebox style in style.css) I let a brain-o slip and renumbered all the sideboxes, getting rid of the “Pages” sidebox. I’ll go back and fix this tonight. Sigh.

Theme switching (along with everything else about blogging and WordPress) is new to me. I found this tutorial for Ryan Boren’s wpthemeswitcher to be a big help. Who would have thought that theme switching could be this easy? I added theme-switcher code to the WordPress default theme, so now all my themes (except Classic) can be selected on-the-fly by individual readers.

Many thanks to all the authors/designers mentioned in this post! Pingbacks are on the way, but I’ll be leaving comments on everybodys’ blogs “in person” as well.