A quick personal wiki/how-to entry on getting the Facebook connect plugin working with a custom WordPress theme.
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 (Read on…)
Been trying to do a few things lately that are a little bit more difficult than they should be. Really. Editing the hosts file on the Mac is one, installing WordPress MU on MAMP is the other.
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.
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.
I’ve had a fairly productive 2 weeks at the new job doing some serious work with WordPress and it’s time for me to jot down some notes before I forget everything that I’ve done.
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.
After what seemed like about 2 weeks since WordPress 2.6.5 start to nag me across the top of the page, version 2.7 comes out. I’ve been kind of excited about this release since I’ve seen screen shots so I went ahead and installed it here.
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.
More for my personal WordPress Wiki, but I can’t believe I didn’t share this before.
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.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Feel free to use my stuff, just Be sure to let me know.