webiiclass posts

Stearns: Slideshow, Media Tags

in

We wanted an image slideshow for our sidebar. I looked at some of the plugins available for doing this, but none looked to be exactly what we wanted, nor did they look very simple. I've worked with jQuery before with various image things, so I used it to build my own slideshow (building it in OO added to the development time, but it should be fairly versatile now). Then I had to get the appropriate images from Wordpress to work with my javascript, which was quite a bit of work as well.

We want the images to easily be updatable by Stearns.  I don't know why I was dead-set on having them be able to use the media library, but I was.  They could FTP files into a folder, which would be much easier for me.  But they might not even know how to do this, and letting them handle everything through the wordpress interface is preferable.  They'd have to crop and size them properly.  The images in the folder also wouldn't have captions.  So I pressed on.

I thought perhaps I could have them update a gallery on a particular page, after having thought the gallery function wass very neat.  But it seems there is no way to add items from the media library to a gallery for a page (not in regular wordpress anyway) and I'm not sure that the "delete" link does what I want for removing items from the gallery (and I'm not willing to try).

Continue reading post "Stearns: Slideshow, Media Tags"

Stearns: Two Content Columns Per Page

in

Our layout has some pages with a three column layout and some pages with only two columns.  The left column is always the same, but the other two will have one or two columns based on individual page content.  For a while, we've had the third column on the home page and an empty third column on other pages, but we ran into troubles when we wanted to add the third column content to the other pages.

The columns use float to get their positioning and can't be inside each other or the text from one would flow under the other.  A few options came to mind.  We tried closing template divs and opening others in the HTML editor of the page content: this did not work for us, somehow removing the background that was supplied by a wrapper.  It would be trouble for Stearns anyway.  We also tried removing the container for the center column from the template and putting one div into two column pages, two into three column pages.  This gave some difficulties with the editor, would require the divs on every page, and would be difficult for Stearns and us to work with.

Continue reading post "Stearns: Two Content Columns Per Page"

Stearns: Move, Menu, Flutter and Permissions

in

The Move

We finally bought the domain name and hosting account for Stearns, at stearnshomestead.com.  We were expecting them to want a .org due to their nonprofit status, but I guess they wanted the familiarity of the .com.  They have no company credit card, so Angela had to set up the account and will bill them for a check.  I don't know what they'll do in the future:  They'll probably have to have one of their members do a similar thing.

We moved our Wordpress install from its temporary location in a subfolder of one of Angela's sites to the root of the new site.  There was perhaps a bit of trouble moving the site, but once we figured it out, the install worked perfectly.  To move, we transferred from one site to the other via FTP all site files.  We then used PHPMyAdmin to export the site data as SQL and then import it to the new site (didn't have to use PHPMyAdmin for the new site, as the host has an import function in their control panel).  We then had to update the config file for Wordpress to reference the new database.  Finally, we had to change two URLs in the options table in the database.  Everything now works.

Continue reading post "Stearns: Move, Menu, Flutter and Permissions"

Stearns: Using Wordpress as CMS

in

I mentioned my concerns of using Wordpress as a CMS in a previous post, but now it is getting to be the time to find solutions to our problems. We have installed a test wordpress site and have begun working on it. The style is still bare, but I am looking at functionality issues. I used those links from the previous post plus some other sites found on Google to find potential solutions. I haven't made any final decisions yet on what should work for us, but I'll document some of my considerations

Events and Recipes

One issue we will have is needing custom data fields for the events and the recipes. Wordpress has custom fields built in, but it would be best if the fields could be there automatically, without them having to add them and get the names exactly right each time.

Flutter is one plugin solution that looks nice. It allows custom write panels to be created in the admin section, so that events or recipes could be managed and added separately from the normal posts. It allows custom fields to be defined for each panel as well. It even allows data types to be defined, so dates for the events could be entered easily. It does have some issues, such as some bugginess and rumored slowness when post numbers get high. This did sell me on the custom write panel idea though.

Continue reading post "Stearns: Using Wordpress as CMS"
</toby>