Today I decided I needed to have the ability to have tags on TravelingThoughts. I also decided that the best way to do so, instead of going out and getting another plugin that I had to keep an eye on, I just needed to upgrade from WP 2.2.something.from.long.ago to WP 2.3.1 and I did just that. But then, I had to upgrade a ton of plugin’s, not a problem because I was told which ones I needed to upgrade, with the exception of google_sitemap_generator, and as a result, I was getting this error:
SELECT cat_ID AS ID, MAX(post_modified) AS last_mod FROM `wp_posts` p LEFT JOIN `wp_post2cat` pc ON p.ID = pc.post_id LEFT JOIN `wp_categories` c ON pc.category_id = c.cat_ID WHERE post_status = ‘publish’ GROUP BY cat_ID
But I’m smart, instead of posting a new thread on some forum, I googled my error, and whoa, lo and behold, other people had had this problem too, I just had to upgrade my plugin, and BAM! no more errors.
The other great thing I did was add tags to my layout, but then I was unsatisfied with what the links were returning. The use by default call
<?php the_tags(); ?>
didn’t do much more for me than return a link that re-directed peeps to a list of my entries with the same tags, that didn’t even come remotely close to what my expectations were.
Enter the Technorati Tags Plugin for WordPress 2.3, this plugin did exactly what I was expecting. My tags, when clicked on will go to Technorati and show all posts with the same tag, not just go to my site and show you all my posts with the tags I labeled them with.
I am now a happy camper.
I love WordPress. I love what I was able to do with it over at my diabetes site, Ride to Remedy. There is usually not a day where I can say a bad thing about WordPress. It’s little brother, bbPress however, is giving me problems. Huge problems! Beginning with the fact that it won’t even let me get to the installation screen.
There is no good reason (any where) why it should be giving me a fatal error. What kind of app are you? It is not wise to give people fatal errors before they can even get you installed. Behavior like that is what sends people looking for some other app to fill their needs. Do you get it, you’re not filling my needs and I need you to fill them…
This is unacceptable:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: __() in /home/2816/domains/ridetoremedy.com/html/community/bb-includes/default-filters.php on line 81
Completely unacceptable…
I was over at Blog About Your Blog earlier today reading their article on the 6 Spanking New WordPress Plugins You Haven’t Seen. Of the six plugins they felt worthy of from the WordPress Plugins competition held at WeblogToolsCollection blog, I found two that were worthy of me installing.
1) MyDashboard was a must because I was very much not impressed by the default Dashboard given to us by the folks at WordPress. I had my own thoughts of what I’d like to do with it, and now my life has been simplified because I can simply customize MyDashboard to fit my needs. I can change everything from the look of the dashboard to the various “gadgets” I’d like to have on it thanks to the iGoogle like style. Now I just have to write my own little gadgets.
2) WordPress Automatic Upgrade was installed simply because I hate doing the upgrades to Wordpress.
So over the past couple of days, I’ve been talking about using WordPress to completely power Ride to Remedy, And over the past couple of days I’ve been up until all hours of the night working on the separate pages to get it all into WordPress so that everything is centrally managed. I’ve done it. Tonight (almost the next morning) I got my one last page into WordPress. This one was hard because I needed it to reference a previously made post. But now it’s coded and it’s up. And all that’s left to do to the site is small stuff. It’s a beautiful feeling. I’ve got WordPress running as a fully functional CMS. It just doesn’t get any better than that.
And with that said, I’m going to bed and I’m going to get some very much needed sleep. Tomorrow night I’ll spend the time working on the small stuff, I’ve got an entire list, but I’m entirely way to tired to type it all up.
I’ve been fighting with WordPress all night trying to make it so that I could have a custom field on the Write Page page that would populate from the db. It’s been a royal pain in the ass. Luckily for me, it wasn’t as painful as it could’ve been thanks to Joshua and his Custom Field GUI. What took so much work was that he didn’t have the capability for me to pull my data from the database which is really what I needed. Someone had commented on how they had made that adjustment but their code wasn’t posted anywhere and that was a huge bummer.
In the process of doing what I needed to do, I learned how much I really don’t know about WordPress and all the functions that it makes available to us. I eventually (after a whole lot of searching on the web) ended up in the post-template file to learn about the_title() and get_the_ID(). I was having so many problems because the functions I was calling were echoing out what I really needed to throw into a variable.
I finally got my drop down to populate from the database which is great because the final page that I have left to incorporate into WordPress needs the custom field. What I’m doing is with this final page is 2 things:
1) I’m pulling in a single post (the post chosen from this custom drop down list that has been a royal pain in the behind.
2) I’m pulling in additional data from an xml file that I’ve generated that is also referenced by the post chosen from the custom drop down list.
what this allows me to do is make a ride synopsis page available for each tour de cure I do and have a permalink for it instead of the page.php?p=# syntax.
I’m probably making no sense at this point, but it’s beautiful, you’ll see when it’s done.
I’ve been spending a lot of time working on my pet project Ride to Remedy lately. Last night I took all that I had done and made it 90% WordPress manageable. When I began the site only the blog entries were managed by WordPress. All the other pages: the home page, the photo gallery, the past rides page. They were all built manually by me and had a different file structure that supported them.
One of the things I wanted to do was to make my life easy in the future when it came to updates so I spent the night last night converting all the pages I had built and making them WordPress friendly. It took a lot of work and there were all kinds of frustrations and I’m scared of what’s going to happen if there’s ever a WordPress update that breaks all the work that I’ve done. Luckily, on Ride to Remedy, unlike on Traveling Thoughts, I’m running the most current version of WP.
The only page I have left to get into WP is my pages where they’re pulling info from a blog post and an xml post and they’re a page themselves. Basically, the past rides synopsis page. This page is going to take a little more work because I want to write a plugin that will give me a dropdown and list all my posts from a certain category so that I can relate my page to it. It’s going to take a bit of work, but with a little perseverance it shouldn’t be a problem. It’ll bring me to a point where I’m using WP as my CMS and nothing else. Everything will be intertwined and incorporated with each other.
When it’s all said and done and I’m not spending so much time on it, I’m thinking I’m going to write some tutorials that show just how I’m using WP as my CMS (content management system) just because WP is so powerful. Mostly people just think of it as a blog platform, but I’ve discovered that it has the potential to be so much more. So, keep an eye out for my WordPress as a CMS series. It’s coming soon. I know there are other tutorials out there, but if I don’t write about it, I’ll never be able to remember all that I’ve done.
The other day I missed a meebo me message because I had stepped away from my desk and I had no clue who it was from because they didn’t tell me. Needless to say, they weren’t around when I returned. Then tonight one of my buddies decided to harass me using the meebo me widget that I had on my contact page.
I decided that it was quite possible that I wasn’t being contacted because people don’t quite understand the concept of IM witout AIM or MSN or YIM (doubtless, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.) So I’ve gone ahead and put a contact form up thanks to a plugin by Dagon Design. I’ve used his non-WordPress form mailer on another site and decided that I’d go ahead and incorporate it on my sites that are using WordPress. It’s so easy to use and now people can contact me in a semi-normal manner.
So, go ahead, contact me.
Until today, I’d never seen wp_footer(). Until today, there was no reason for me to spend several hours searching for wp_footer. It’s all Owen’s fault at Ugh!!’s Greymatter Honeypot or maybe it’s my fault for wanting what Owen had to offer. It all started yesterday when I was poking around PayPerPost and making updates and seeing what I had to do to get some opportunities that I qualified for (something I hadn’t qualified for since the implementation of segmentation, but that’s another story). One of the things that’s suggest be on our blog is PayPerPost tools and Owen had made a nice little plugin for wordpress that would put what I needed where I needed it without me having to edit any code. Totally cool right? I thought so, right up until it didn’t work.
Owen’s PPP Ad Disclosure plugin wasn’t working and I had no idea why. I had followed his instructions, I mean how hard could it have been, there was only 3 steps: Download it from his site, upload it to mine and activate it. That’s cake right? Not so much. After hours of scouring the web for wp_footer (which brought up many sites for creating plugins that would plug something into the footer, all of which were similarly written as Owen’s), hrm, I have no clue what I did, but whatever it was I eventually discovered that I needed to put a call to wp_footer() in my footer.php file. Once that was done, everything worked as it should.
Needless to say, I thanked Owen for his plugin and let him know of a possible problem if wp_footer() is lacking in the footer.php file.
The stuff you learn when you want something new.
