In addition to Wordpress, I have been playing around with Drupal as I am seriously considering it as an alternative to Susan’s Science Site.
In the course of creating dumonty.com, a drupal learning and testing site, I have discovered a couple of very cool plugins.
First, for a text editor, tinyMCE seems to do just about all the commercial plugin does.
I am using tinyMCE at dumonty.com. Now, I had tried all the opensource text editors before but I ended up going with a paid license that I use for this blog as I found the opensource projects lacking in the image manipulation area.
An end user should be able to insert an image into her text by clicking on the image icon and having the option to view and select an image from her image library or upload and select image. She should be able to do this without having to remember a path. She should be able to do this without a placeholder and she should be able to set the margins or padding between the image and text. If these features can’t be implemented then the way to achieve the same results should be clear.
This is where the the various opensource packages seem to fail.
However, when I adding tinyMCE to Drupal on the dumonty site I was quite please with all the features that came with it. No, the image feature doesn’t work quite the way I would like but Drupal has some wonderful image modules that allows for at least some of the requirements I am looking for. Those modules combined with tinyMCE have produced a great package.
On a whim, I took a few minutes to explored the two leading opensource image galleries, Coppermine and Gallery2, and discovered a couple of suprise plugins.
I am investigating the various “Site Builder” technologies offered on the web these days.
My reason for looking into this is the need to have a “central” way to create or edit web pages.
The areas I need filled include:
- ease of use for beginners.
- Scalabity or the ability to port to another product as the end user outgrows.
- XML should make this need easy enough.
- PHP ability
- I should be able to expand functionality by adding PHP modules as needed.
- MySQL ability
- Flat files will work for small sites and it has its place. I prefer using MySQL database for lists.
- Security
- I would like to see a system where authentication is passed from the software to htaccess in order to upload–write to directory. This would be allow 622 settings on all directories.
- Image and file upload both simple and more compex
- Just a simple upload button is a good feature for NOOB
- The ability to create subdirectories in order to organize or categorize is good for a more advanced user who needs to categorize.
- The ability to use Cascading Style Sheets is important to me.
- The ability to add templates. Either my own or purchased ones.
- Editors are all pretty similar. This is actually the least of my concerns.
For one reason or another, I consider these sites to be above average in design and layout. They are worth emulating.
I am sure that the rest of the site is as nicely done.
This site doesn’t have spectacular WOW features. It is very appealing to me however. It is worth studying to see what works and what doesn’t.
Wordpress Category Navigation–one way to skin a $cat.
My Goal–navigation forward and back in my Web Blog site.
I wanted to display a front splash page which included a little a synopsis of the site’s purpose as well as links to my main or top level Categories.
From any of the Category pages, I wanted the visitor to know location–where she/he was relative to the whole site. I also wanted anyone to be able to drill down into the categories and still retain links from the upper lever categories and never loose the site logo.
Dynamic Category Highlighting in Wordpress 2.1X(?)
I was searching
Wordpress.org for an easy way to assign a unique class or ID to the current-category for formatting reasons. Specifically, to highlight the current category to use as a navigational tool for the site visitor. Wordpress allows “current page” assignment quite easily–without any additional code to your templates, but the searching on wordpress.org came up blank for categories. Well, as such the case with me, I happened to be viewing one of my source files and low and behold!
Wordpress was automatically assigning a current-cat class to the current category. What a great find!
Developing a weblog beyond the default install can present the blog developer / designer with certain dilemmas from time to time.
The wordpress.org site has tons of information. It is sometimes tough finding exactly the “just right” answer or fix to such dilemmas.
Currently, I am working on a site “littlespiderweb.org” which is/will be incorporating both posts and Pages. (For a discussion that distiguishes the difference between a post and a page in a wordpress blog, see
http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages .)
The site’s purpose is to document my NYC trip(s.) My trip planning pages will utilize Pages–not posts. However, I would like to implement the Pages with posts–using them as comments or perhaps reminders to myself. I would also like to use posts as a diary and journal–comments on my thoughts–for my actual trip.
To make a ”seamless” transition between a Page template and a single post template, I decided to try naming post categories that are duplicates to the Main Page titles.
If someone clicks on a link from a Page to a single post, I want to preserve the title of the original Page to use as my search query for the category to display.
These are the links that provide the “how to:”
Update 06/03/06: Apparently, I am not the only one with this idea of using a page name in conjunction with category names so that I could round out the wordpress features. If I find the discussion again, I will post it.
As alluded to in an earlier post, I am trying to fine tune the navigation on my “littlespiderweb.org” site so that both Pages and posts display related content. The first step was to duplicate the name of my parent Pages as categories.
On “littlespiderweb.org,” I decided to organize on a trip by trip basis. So, in addition to naming a Page “May 2006,” I created a category “May 2006″ as well. All my posts for this trip will be put into this category.
The idea is, that when someone visiting the web site clicks on the Page named “May 2006,” the system will not only display a list of all the children pages to “May 2006,” but display a list of all posts in the category “May 2006″ as well.
The templates that I am using to achieve the desired effect is one specific page template that I named “lookingback.php” and the “single.php” template. Both of these templates started out as copies of either home.php or index.php. Both of these templates are identical. The reason for both of course is due to the Wordpress defaults in handling Pages and posts.
Here’s how…