Sorry, I’ve been lost in geekland, working on the new site. But I think I have it now, the thing that’s been holding me up: WordPress conditional tags. I had to study up on PHP syntax, but I got a little test to work. Heh.
What this means is that I can have certain blocks of content appear in the same place on specific types of pages and not on others. CONTROL, chilluns!
Wow. I could actually get good at this.
UPDATE: I have a couple of friends who can’t believe how long I’ve been working on the new site. Well, I can’t believe it either, and when some people see it, they’ll wonder what all the fuss was about! But the whole point of this is really technical: there are conventional ways to customize a WordPress blog theme, most of which involve swapping out graphics, tinkering with core PHP files, and modifying the CSS. The Thesis theme, however, contains a core framework that is never edited. Instead, one makes changes to a custom stylesheet and custom “functions” PHP file. This means that future updates will be drop-dead simple, as all I’ll have to do is drop the latest version of theme (or WordPress software) into place and just carry over my .custom_css and custom_functions.php files, both of which reside in a folder along with my custom images.
For someone like me, this is simply amazing. It’s stupendous. It means, in essence, that I will never have to redesign the core architecture of my sites again. Not ever. Well, never is a long, long time, but still… And this is why I’m converting all my sites, even FotoFeed, to this arrangement. (Want to try it yourself? Read these Thesis testimonials.)
So what’s taking so much time? I’m learning PHP, a programming language for database-driven websites. Not systematically, but just enough to do what I want. What I learned last night is the equivalent of finding where to insert the ignition key in a car, so things should move a little faster now…
No related posts.
