Tag Archive for 'Themes'

K2 Home Page for WPMU

Upon deciding to use K2 for my WPMU installation, I was troubled at the idea of setting up a ‘home’ page like the home theme that comes standard in the WPMU.

I’m troubled a lot, when I do things like this.  I’m no idiot when it comes to this stuff, but I am very amateur and will (quite stupidly) try things on my own for countless hours of frustration before hitting the forums and other usual avenues of information.  I am my own biggest pain in my ass.

Any other theme would pose less of a problem for me, but K2 is a very, very nice and more complex theme, and is ridiculously easy to make additional styles for.  So what I wanted to do was create a ‘home’ style that I could use for the home page.  I thought that this would be very easy.

For once I was right.

In the main K2 directory, I created a new page template (and called it page2.php – very original, I know). And at the top of the template, I included the following:


<?php
/*
Template Name: home
*/
?>

This is so that when you create the page in the next step, ‘home’ will show up as a page template option.

On the page2.php, I added the php coding that I wanted for the ‘home’ page as if it were the regular index page, calling for the header, content, sidebar and footer. One could always just cut and paste the code from the original home theme ‘home.php’ page and adjust for CSS as necessary.

After saving the file, I created a page in the dashboard, titled it ‘ill-literati.org’ so that would show up in the tab menu and saved the page with no additional content.

I then went to the Site Admin: Settings: Reading and chose ‘Static Page’ for Front Page Displays, with Front Page set to ‘ill-literati.org’. Saved my settings and went to the home page and BAM! Just what I wanted and in no time flat for once.

There is probably a better way to to this, possibly an easier way, but this does work and for the moment, that’s good enough for me.

ComicPress 2.1

Wanna talk briefly about the theme I’m using for the comics here.

ComicPress 2.1: It’s a great theme, designed for the publishing of webcomics.  I had tried to just swipe the code for my own failed comic theme (giving full credit where it was due of course), because I was hoping it would be easier to just plug the code into my own theme files and have it work seamlessly.  It mostly worked.

Mostly.

So I decided to just use the ComicPress theme, and modify it to match my theme.  It took longer than it did to plug it into my own theme, but it mostly worked better.

Mostly.

I had to make a bunch of changes here and there to get things to line up and jive right.  The comments forms, for instance, are all askew.  I can’t figure that one out for the life of me.  But everything shows up the way it should, and the archives look purty.

Note: At this time, developer Tyler Martin is working on the next version which will be more compatible with WP 2.5.   I’m currently using it on WPMU 1.3.3, which I would not advise for your typical WPMU install. The comics have to be uploaded to a comics directory in the root directory, and it pulls the comic by date.  This means that if you’re trying to host more than one comic, you would need to post each one on a different date.  For me, with my two or possibly three comics, that’s not so bad.  But for an install with multiple users doing multiple comics, it would be a little more than difficult.

That may be another summer project of mine, getting it to work better with WPMU.  But if you have a single install, this theme is pretty kick ass.

AB