Tag Archive for 'WordPress'

ComicPress 2.1

Published on April 19, 2008 in Themes. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

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

Plugins: The Ill-Literati List

Published on April 18, 2008 in Plugins. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

The following is a list of Plugins I use on the Ill-Literati site.

Akismet:  It’s a spam catcher, and it works very well, especially in conjunction with a good captcha plugin.

Copperpress:  This plugin kicks ass.  It integrates the Coppermine Gallery with your WordPress install.  It automatically logs you into your Coppermine Gallery when you log into WordPress, and makes your images available to insert on posts and pages on your ‘write’ page through WordPress.  Set up is easy, and it will automatically integrate and create logins for other users on your WP install.  I have not been able to figure out how to use it as a general WP-MU Plugin, so I do need to activate it and configure it on each blog. But to be honest, I haven’t had much time to look into setting up for MU.  That’ll be a summer project, unless someone else has some info/code for me. It was last updated for WP 2.3.2 but I have had no problems with it in latest updates (up to 2.5).

Homepage Excerpts: This nifty plugin lets you choose how many full posts you’d like to have on your homepage, and makes excerpts of the rest.  I have it currently set to make the latest post full, and the rest just excerpts.

reCAPTCHA:  This is a captcha plugin with a secondary purpose.  It’s main purpose for you is to help block spam by making users leaving a comment, enter the two distorted words they see in an image.  Bots aren’t supposed to be able to do that (yet).  With reCAPTCHA, the words come from actual books, and what you’re somehow doing is helping to teach computers to read them words to digitize books.  Which I sometimes think will just one day enable computers to easily defeat captcha.  But I’m down for getting books digitized, so I guess we’ll just wait and see what happens.

Recent Comments Widget: This is a bit different from the standard widget. It lists the recent comments, but groups them by post title, which I like.

TTFTitles: This is one of my favorites.  This plugin lets you turn text into fancy image graphics.  It’s what I use for the blog title and blog description on this site, as well as for the post titles.  You can upload just about any font you want, create new style, plug some code into your theme and there you have it.  I’ve done some minor hacking to this plugin (another one I couldn’t get working in MU yet) and added my styles to the default list and set my default style as the default style, so that I don’t have to set them up on each and every blog in the MU install.  And it seems to work pretty good.

As I add more plugins, I’ll post them here.

AB

How I did it.

Published on April 13, 2008 in How I Did It and News. 0 Comments Tags: .

Welcome to amateur hour?

Not so much anymore. While I have nowhere near the skills to seriously warrant a blog on the ins and outs of WordPress, I have enough amateurish experience to share some things with the blogging community. Mostly on how I hack my way through maintaining my WordPress & WordPress MU installations.

The Theme: Ill-Literati 1.5. I designed it myself, with very little borrowed code. It’s called . Everything is based on the Kubrick theme, with the entrymeta tags borrowed from Freedom-Black & Widgetized, which was a theme I had modified for Ill-Literates.com. The theme is done enough for my own usage, though I need to do some cleanup in the style sheet from my constant tinkering.

I do plan on releasing it very soon, but aside from the css, I need to clean up some of the plugin reliant code that’s rampant throughout the theme, because not everyone is going to want to use the same plugins to do the things I have them do here. More on them later.

I’ve made three versions of this same theme. The second is a ‘home’ Ill-Literati theme, which is the WordPress MU ‘home’ theme that can be seen when we go to ill-literati.org. It’s got a specialized home page for the community aspect of the blog, which I’ve done some tinkering with, and I plan on doing some more.

The third was designed for webcomics, with all of the comic coding copied from the excellent ComicPress 2.1 theme. For the original Ill-Literates web comics page, I had modified the ComicPress theme to fit my whole site. This time around, I just copied all of the comic related code and plugged it into my theme. You can see it in use at Bad Napkin Art & Jedi Jesus.

This site is using WordPress MU (which stands for Multi User). It’s designed for large blogging communities, and not really for what I’m doing with it. You can literally run thousands of blogs on one install of WPMU. I only plan on running about a dozen or so.

The reason I decided to go with WordPress MU was because I wasn’t satisfied with having multiple users on one blog, and having a new WordPress installation for each and every very separate project was a real pain in the ass.

Because at heart, I’m lazy. I admit it.

Warning: WPMU is not for the faint of heart. I shouldn’t even be running it, considering my lack of skill and expertise. But I’ve always done this with things like this. I dive in and try and keep my head up until I own it. Also, if you’re thinking about using it on a hosted server, you’d better think small. Large blog communities take a lot of resources from the server, and you’ll find yourself dumped no matter how awesome the package you purchased was. Again, I’m planning a small installation.

The main plugin that’s readily visible in the theme now (and must come out for general usage by the public) is TTFTitles. I love this plugin. It’s grown from what was once HeadlineImages. It takes your text and creates an image of that text using the font of your choice. It’s how I’ve done the fancy blog title and description, as well as the title for each post.

It works fairly well in WPMU. But if you want to make some of your own styles and have them default for each blog, you’ll need to hack the plugin so that your styles will show up for each blog, as well as change the default. I’ll get into that another day.

I’ll be updating this blog on a regular basis, with my own hacks, finds or advice. But remember that I am an amateur in a very real way. If something works for me, it may not necessarily be a good thing for you. And if you think or know that you can do better than me, please let me know. I’m always up for being humbled as a learning process.

AB