From Archchef at casualgaminformer.com comes this question.

Is there a way to disable the “Last visitors” section in the widget? I don’t exactly want nor need it but can’t find any way of killing the darn thing

This one is very easy. To remove the part of the widget you don’t want to see, open fbconnect_widget.php and scroll down to line 31, or there about. There are 2 lines below that, remove them, save and upload. You should be good to go. If you want the code, leave a comment below and I’ll hook you up.

I know the plugin still isn’t 100% here. I hope to have that fixed before I go to Vegas this coming weekend.

Then, as dev continued, I got the idea that I really should try to make it more of a standard WP theme, make sure it works in all browsers, make sure it looks good in all browsers and works with just about any plugin I throw at it. All of that is the reason why this theme took me over 3 months of tweaking to develop.

And, for the first time ever, it has been replicated. You can see the screen shot above, or view it live here. That’s right, it’s the My Cruise Planner site that Michael and his lovely wife work on, post news articles to and host their Mail Buoy podcast from.

Of course I had way too much of the hand coded stuff in it for them to use, primarily in the sidebar. If I were to distribute this as a stand-alone-anyone-can-use-it theme, I would leave that almost blank anyway and let whoever took it use it for whatever they wanted, much like I have done for the MCP site.

I did have to make a few others changes as well. Primarily in the categories, and this is my best wordpress trick and I’m using it everywhere I need this functionality.

• Create a main, or parent, category
• Create sub, or child, categories under the parent
• Set category base to ’section’ (it could be anything really)

Doing this allows separation of the parent categories within the structure of the site while at the same time not excluding anything from the RSS feed. I’m sure many of you have already noticed that the podcasts are showing up in your feeds, yet you do not see them on the ‘blog’ section here.

Just thought I’d toot my own before I changed the portfolio page.

If you do need any kind of travel, you really should talk to them first. No foolin’, they have saved my butt more than a few times. It’s also why they are the official travel planners of White Roof Radio.

I spent a good part of the day setting up the Facebook Connect plugin over at Motoringfile. I also set it up here, but haven’t spent nearly as long tweaking it. That means it’s personal wiki time! Weeeeeee

This plug-in does require a few things to work correctly.

You need to add this to the html line in header.php.

Also in the header you should have

In the footer, you need

Your theme should be widgetized. There is a code chunk at the plugin site if it’s not. I’ll be writing this up soon as well.

Once you do everything you need to do to get the plugin installed and configured so it works in your theme, then it’s time to make it look good in your theme as well.

The easiest way to do this is to copy the style from index.php. This includes the call to header.php and any styles that happen before the loop. You will also want to grab the call to footer.php. Paste all of that into the top and bottom of the following files.

• myhome.php

• community.php

• userprofile.php

• invitefriends.php

Once that is done, it should fit nicely into your theme. Don’t look at this one, yet. Go over and check it out at Motoringfile.com instead.

Finally, if you want to remove the check from the box in the comments, you will need to edit fbConnectInterface.php. Find the following line on or around line 47.

And remove the part that says

checked="checked"

I am available for questions or to assist you should you need it.

Starting with the editing of the hosts file. It should be. Just. This. Simple.

Right? Yea, that doesn’t work for me since vi makes no sense to me at all and I couldn’t figure out how to open it in such a way that I could actually make changes.

For those of you in the audience that are neck beard and ponytail challenged, here is what you do.

• From the Finder menu, click Go –> Go to Folder
• Type in /etc
• Find your Hosts file. Double click to open it. I recommend editing it with Smultron since it will allow you to authenticate to save.

That’s how you do that.

Now, to install Wordpress MU on MAMP. I have spent more than an hour trying to find the solution. All I manage to find are crappy responses on message boards, but not a single link to my solution. It requires editing the httpconf file in MAMP and the hosts file I do know that.

So far it’s installed and I can get a 404 page. Once I make it work, I will be posting it here as well.

The front page is 100% automated pulling posts from a single category twice, all of the posts once plus the feed from a message board. Almost exactly like the homepage here. A new addition to the layout that I have not used before is a jQuery slider. After some tweaking it’s actually very very cool. To get an idea, it works like this. I will be getting more into jQuery in the very near future.

Moving off the home page is a custom category template where, if need be, a different header graphic can be displayed for each category. Too keep the template file to a minimum, this is all driven from 2 php files and 1 css file. Normally you could build out 1 category template for each category, but with over 20 cats, that would get to be a bit unweildy. Same goes with the CSS. It’s just easier to keep all those category page specific styles in their own file. Turns out, I am not doing the individual templates, but should minds change, it’s ready to go.

From there, it’s just a normal single.php and index.php to display everything else.

Something new I’m having to deal with is user accounts. No comments without first creating an account and all that. I did it once and did not like the fact that a regular user, upon logging in, sees the WP Dashboard. A quick google search got me a hack for wp-login.php that redirects on login to whatever page I specify. Very very cool. I will be adding a login area anywhere that is needed to keep normal users from seeing either the WP login page or the Dashboard.

And, of course, since I have user logged in or not information, I’m able to do some cool if-else magic for displaying ads or not, changing sections of the page, or not. Pretty much whatever I want to do. Could probably have a completely different theme for users that are logged in if I wanted to. Very very cool stuff.

In total there are 17 template files, 4 files for the script that runs the slider and 3 CSS files. By far the most involved theme I have ever built. And right now it is 100% operational. I need to do a little tweaking on the layout yet plus run it through IE.

I hope it passes.

It definitely looks more like an application now, as opossed to something that runs in the browser.

Newest feature that rocks?

Quick edit, right from the manage posts screen. Sweet! Also built-in automatic upgrade. It’s about time. That will definitely make it easier to install the always-too-soon updates to WP.

So far, this theme and most of the plugins check out. There is a minor problem with the Viddler plug-in and the dashboard page, but it’s working well otherwise.

If you are wondering if you should update, I would. Might as well get it out of the way. With the auto-updater built in, the next update should be a piece of cake.

I’m sure you’ve seen the front page of donburnside.com or even the Motoringfile News Room. I built both of them using features built into Wordpress and nothing else. How did I do it?

Start by checking out this page at the Codex.

Retrieves an RSS feed and parses it. Uses the MagpieRSS and RSSCache functions for parsing and automatic caching and the Snoopy HTTP client for the actual retrieval.

If you scroll down the page a little bit there is an example of what you need to get things working. In my testing, I started with that as a base and modified it for how I needed it to look and work. Once you get it working the way you want, what do you do with it?

I built custom page templates within the Wordpress theme that included the code to pull the RSS feeds I wanted. Then, I created a page with a title and used that custom template for the page. If you are familiar with modifying WP template files or creating custom template files, then it should be easy for you too.

Things To Consider When Using WordPress as a CMS | Devlounge.

New Toys

I’ve had a $50 Amazon.com gift certificate burning a hole in my account for the last month, so I thought I would use that to get a new toy or two, plus a book for the lad.

First up, a replacement clip for my Gorilla Pod. I lost the original one somewhere and Amazon sells them for $5, so that’s done.

The other thing I’ve been wanting to get is a mono pod to use with the The Flip. You might have seen the test I posted the other day. So far, I think it’s pretty awesome. I can’t wait to try it with the other cameras in the house either.

It’s an Opteka. Collapsed it’s only about 18″ long. Fully extended it’s 6′. Lightweight, nice handle with a wrist strap and it even has a spike on the bottom if I’m in grass or dirt. Pretty snazzy. Oh yea, and cheap! This only cost $12.95. Not too shabby.

You will see this device in use at MTTS LA for sure. Just look for the dork carrying the black walking stick, that will be me.

Wordpress stuff

As much as I’m totally diggin’ the new pressd section, I’m still not 100% happy with the way it works. I managed to make the single post pages look right and the navigation is pretty ok, but it’s screwing up the front page. I’m not sure if I want to hunt down that particular fix or not, so I might be moving it into it’s own Wordpress installation on w(t)f. Watch for that, possibly later this week.

Next up for w(t)f as far as Wordpress goes is a modernization of the theme. I would like it to work with widgets and to get the avatars working in comments. Plus some minor refreshing of the layout is in order. Again, watch for that to happen later in the week.

I’m hoping to get those changes done and start possibly on a redo of WRR. I’ve not been pleased with it’s appearance for quite a while, and have a some huge ideas for it. So keep an eye out for that in the near future. Besides, we are 3 years old. Time for something really really cool I think!

I wasn’t terribly pleased with the way my “Press This” posts were blending in with the normal posts here. They were, really, out of place I’m sure you would agree.

I know our good friend Josh does, since he moved all of his link-type posts out to a whole other site.

I tried that with tumblr if you recall, but the lack of comments and layout control really bothered me.

So, I built my own. Ha.

It’s not fancy. No plug-ins are used or anything. It’s just this page, completely stripped of everything and some layout changes made. You will notice those posts are now gone from the front page even. Sure I’m going to tell you how I did it (after a jump), but before I do, lemme tell you how to find it.

http://www.windthefrog.net/archive/wtf/category/pressd/.

Ok, so it’s not terribly elegant and that’s only because of my ridiculous spam-bot-squashing ninja-like rewrite rules. It’s ok, the link is also at the bottom of all of the pages. What’s even cooler than that is when you get there, you will see a very large feed icon. See? Who watches out for you, huh? That’s right and don’t you forget it!

Update. I have also modified the main w(t)f feed to exclude those posts. If you want to keep them separate, unsubscribe to the old one and resubscribe to the new one. Or, don’t change anything, it’s entirely up to you. But, if you subscribed to the pressd posts and the original wtf feed, you will see posts twice. No good that.

Now, on to the how. Jump!

This is probably the easiest Wordpress mod you can do yourself. Here is what I did.

• Create a category for those links. Get the category number by pointing at the category in the wp-admin once it’s created and looking at your status bar. Safari users, I can’t help you.
• Make a copy of your index.php and call it category-xxx.php where xxx is the category you just created.
• Upload the new file to your wp-content/themes directory.
• At this point, you are done. If you want to also exclude that category from your main page, you will need to modify your index.php thusly.

find:

< ?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

And add beneath it:

< ?php if (in_category('xxx')) continue; ?>

• Upload your new index.php into your wp-content/theme directory

That’s it! Take a few minutes and style that page out if you want. I gave mine a different header page, removed the sidebars and stripped out a bunch of the formatting. It’s up to you.

Update 2. I’ve made the single post pages look correct as well. Full info on how to do that can be found here. Handy handy stuff!

Man I love Wordpress.