I recently discovered that my page navigation was not letting users get past the first page of posts. Utterly annoying. Then I switched to the default theme temporarily. Whoops. Doing so resets all of your widgets and everything. Forgot about that one. Now I’m just fed up and want to redesign it altogether. So you might be seeing the elegant twentyten twentyeleven theme for a little while.
Category Archives: Website Updates
Upgraded to WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious”
After a case of the “white screen of death” for both my administrator panel as well as the front end pages, I was able to get WordPress 3.0 installed. Sure, I had to delete all of the files in my httpdocs folder and upload everything clean, but now it’s working and that makes me happy.
WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” has some awesome new features that I’m excited about and the video below will help illustrate them.
Bloqhead Gets WordPressed Up
As some may know, I’m an avid user of CMS Made Simple and I’ve developed many a website with CMSMS as the foundation. After much research and consideration, I came to the conclusion that WordPress was my best avenue in regards to something more blogger-friendly and jumped right into development. I needed a system that handled my ever-growing blogging desire more precisely and felt that WordPress was my best bet. At work, my colleague has been fitting a website template with WordPress for a radiostation and it’s been nothing but a dream. The website is primarily a blog and so WordPress fit the bill without question. His enthusiasm in WordPress version 2.7.1 is what sparked me to make the final decision and get this bad boy into transition.
Decision Making
As much as I love CMSMS, it was lacking in an area that my website thrives on most: Blogging. Although all CMS Made Simple packages come bundled with a News module and it functions extremely well, I needed something that archived and catalogued my entries neatly and flawlessly, while offering my viewers the ability to interact in the conversation. Again, WordPress fit this bill perfectly. Hell, you wanna know how great the News module in CMSMS is? I’ve repurposed it and used it for multiple things, such as portfolio galleries, XML feeds, etc. I consider it one of CMS Made Simple’s “pocket knife” modules. It’s fantastic but it’s no WordPress. Even CMS Made Simple’s creator Ted Kulp is an avid WordPress user (Hi, Ted!) and we’ve both agreed that the latest greatest version of WordPress is, well, great.
CMSMS pages administration panel
Getting My Hands Dirty
Despite the fact that I have some prior WordPress development experience, I was somewhat rusty in what was required of me to get my template and all of my content shoved over into a new system. Regaining my bearings was a simple task and one I was able to complete in approximately 3 days. It’s funny because being without my Xbox 360 has allowed for me to get some much needed dev time into my own website, instead of melting my brain with late night sessions of Left 4 Dead, Far Cry 2 and Street Fighter 4.
If you’ve ever used CMS Made Simple yourself, you will know that it’s hands down one of the easiest content management systems to use, both in development and manipulating it to suit your needs. CMSMS uses the Smarty PHP engine, which I’ve grown to love, and implementing a template requires a style sheet, a single file with the required smarty calls plugged in and your images. It’s dead simple and it’s a beautiful thing. You can also use multiple templates throughout your website and even apply a separate template to each page, if your heart so desires. Also, all templates and style sheets are stored as database entries, as opposed to being physical files. This has its flaws and advantages. Like a lot of you developers out there may be, I’m pretty anal retentive about how my files are organized and sorted. I prefer to work with a physical style sheet file and physical files in general. Not to fret though. There is a module available called Template Externalizer which, when turned on, exports all of your template and style sheets as physical files in a directory on your web server. You can then edit these files at your leisure and when the Template Externalizer sees that the files have changed, it updates them in the database. I have a lot of experience and it works great.
Needless to say, it was a bit different when it came time to port the template over to the fresh new WordPress installation. Each template is split into multiple PHP files and dropped into a directory. I love having physical files at my fingertips. I guess it comes from the nostalgia of once working with entirely static websites when CMS weren’t as prominent in the mainstream (and when I had barely any sort of experience with them). Static websites are nearly a thing of the past.
The Final Say
If you’re a developer looking for the perfect blogging solution as your foundation, WordPress is your best bet. If you’re more on the market for something that offers a wide array of expandability and less of a blogger platform, CMS Made Simple is an awesome choice. I’ve built multiple websites with it and love it immensely.
If you’re interested in taking a look at my previous CMSMS setup, head on over to this directory and poke around. I plan on leaving it active as my own personal playground.
sIFR Page Titles
I thought it would spice up the site a bit if I used sIFR titles instead of plain old Arial titles. Simple to implement, accessible and valid. This method has been around for a while and it’s a great idea, but I never took the time to put it to use until now.
Interested in sIFR? Go here.
Bloqhead Gets A Facelift
As you’ve already noticed, I’ve totally revamped Bloqhead.com with a brand spankin’ new design. Below the surface there is also a small list of new revisions, including a newer, better blog module, cleaner/leaner/meaner code (XHTML Strict 1.0 to be exact!) and a simplified structure.
Lately my philosophy for nearly everything has been to keep it as simple as possible. Simplicity goes hand in hand with ease of use and accessibility when it comes to web design and development. I’ve taken this philosophy of simplicity from my everyday life and sought to integrate it more with my designs. Sure, bells and whistles are nice but they’re useless to some. Accessibility is key and as a web developer, I have to cater to a large audience.
Elasticity For Maximum Flexibility!
For you developers and designers out there (especially the web standards nuts), my new website template uses a fully elastic structure. I’ve tested the website down to 800×600 resolution in various browsers with great results. I recently found an old article written by Roger Johansson titled Fixed or fluid width? Elastic! and used it as my guide. It made me take a step back and look at the previous designs I’ve done, the majority of which were fixed width. I questioned what made me use a fixed width and re-thought a lot of my methodology. This was definitely for the better. I have a great understanding of elastic and fluid layouts but the idea of percentages for margin topped it off. In the article about 456 Berea Street’s redesign, Richard Rutter posts a comment that refers to this method as “concertina padding”.
Below is an example of “concertina padding” applied to two floated elements:
#main {float:left;width:59%;margin:0 0 0 4%;}#sidebar {float:right;width:29%;margin:0 2% 0 0;}
The percentages for the margin allow for a greater amount of elasticity when the site is resized to a smaller screen resolution. This was a concept I never really touched on. My method has always been to use a pixel or em based amount for padding or margin. Brilliant.
I hope you enjoy the new layout and feel free to leave comments below!
Server Switch
I switched my website over to our dedicated server at work today. No more shared hosting issues, downtime and slow loading pages. My websites are now on our Linux box and Bloqhead should run a lot smoother now.
Integration, inspiration, progression
Bloqhead had become stagnant for a period due to my lack of time to do anything other than work lately, but I’ve recently gotten back on track with it and have been dilligently writing new CSS, integrating my layout with a fresh CMS Made Simple installation and getting everything pretty. It tends to be a tedious task between testing my smarty templates and writing my classes, id’s, etc. but the end result looks promising.