Faking it: WordPress as CMS pt. 2

Now we comes the part where we throw in some cache-action.  Brought to you by the Dynamic Duo Mattman and Zeller the Boy Wonder.  Now Staticize Reloaded is not the best thing since sliced bread, but it is pretty great regardless.

Now I am not going to get into the "how" the plugin works, I mean who wants that!  We are Americans, we just want it to work now!  So anywhoo, follow these easy steps to set up a little cache action:

• I assume you have followed the above link and downloaded the plugin from Matt's site?  Well if not then go and download away, I will wait.  Done?  Good.
• Now, you want to drop that badboy into your /plugins/ directory located within the /wp-content/ directory.
• While you are in the /wp-content/ dir, go ahead and create another dir called cache within /wp-content/ and make sure to chmod, or set permissions to 777.
• Now login to your admin area and go to plugins, you will now see Staticize Reloaded listed, go ahead and activate it.

That is it, the plugin performs all its tasks behind the scenes.  One caveat, you must deselect gzip compression from the "reading" screen of your options, this is being worked on and should no longer be a factor in the near future.  If you leave it selected it will bork the whole process.

Okay so now we have our pseudo-static sections caching (as well as our non-pseudo-static sections), so what is the next weapon to add to our arsenal?  Read on and find out.

The next part of this tutorial requires you to be able to make changes to your apache setup, either through editing of httpd.conf or through .htaccess.  Sooo... if you can't do one of these two things, please skip on to page 3.  Those of you still with me, lets get to the hackin!  What we are trying to accomplish here is to add some flare to our newly created and cached sections.  Most sites that have aboutme and colophon sections use a site uri something like this: mysite/colophon/, now our solution poses a problem since they are not files in sub-domains, they are php files residing in our $siteroot, or wp directory.  There are two ways to approach this:

1. Create folders for each section, and move the files we created earlier into them, making sure to either a.) make symlinks from $siteroot to the corresponding files in thier sub-directories, or b.) edit each of our pages to point to one directory up, e.g. ../wp-blog-header.php instead of wp-blog-header.php.
2. Or we could perfom some apache magic and eliminate the need for file extensions.  What this gives you is the ability to input say mysite.com/index and have it resolve to index.php.  This also means that if you type in mysite.com/colophon/ it will resolve, no questions asked to mysite.com/colophon.php without updating the URI field.  I think you can see where I am going with this, and the possibilities that this presents.

Also, you can congratulate yourself for being forward thinking.  Eventually everyone will wake up and realize that running your server this way is better for the user.  With this method I could easily move from using php to power my site to cgi or asp (not that I would want to) and my users would never know, and more importantly thier bookmarks and permalinks would not break since they were pointing to chrisjdavis.org/index.

So, what we need to do is fire up the old terminal and edit either httpd.conf or .htaccess.  I will let you find out where these files are located since each distro handles placement differently.  For this haxie we simply need to add this snippet of code:<Directory /home/www/sitename/htdocs>Options + MultiViews
</Directory>to your httpd.conf file or your .htaccess and then once saved, restart apache.  I prefer the lovely:apachectl gracefulcommand to restart apache, since it politely kills the child processes instead of just hacking them off wholesale. ; Now there could be a performance impact by doing the above, but unless you are running with a couple million hits a day, it is minimal.

Okay now we have our site running without file extensions, and caching.  So what is left?  Good question, to close I wanted to suggest some cosmetic changes.  On our pages like aboutme and colophon, we really don't want to have people leave comments, and we don't really need to display the time, day, category and author for each of these "entries" so we should get rid of those function calls.  Keep in mind that what we might want is a last updated on bit of code, that would find the date and time for the newest entry on that cat and echo it out.

That can be accomplished by using a bit of custom code, or by exploiting some of the functions already built into WordPress.  That my friends is your homework.  Well that is it for now, let me know if there is anything else you would like to hear on this topic, or if anything I have stated is not as clear as it could be.

Cheers.

The Return of usability...

By popular demand I have put up the link to all my hacks and plug-ins again.

So now if you are looking for a specific hack/plug-in I have written you can easily find them by following the wp-plugins link in the header.

When good redesigns go bad...

I won't post much here about this issue, since the comments that have been left at Design by Fire say mostly what I would, only I would say them in a much less hero-worship-y tone.

Unfortunately Andrei Herasimchuk, who is an incredibly talented designer has fallen victim to the fallacy that print design can ever work on the internet.  From a usability, accesability and well, logical standpoint that is just not possible.  I am not advocating that the "concepts" employed in print design have no place in web design, that is of course blatantly false.  Having worked in Print Design for a number of years, I use the lessons learned there in every piece of design I create that is meant to convey meaning to a reader.

Again I am not going to restate the obvious flaws in Herasimchuk's design, but I just wanted to point some of you budding weblog/website designers to the conversation that is going on over there about this, and show you how even the most gifted designer can drop the ball from time to time.

Faking it: WordPress as CMS pt. 1

Part two is now up, you can find it over here.  This series is by no means exhaustive, but it is a good place to begin to understand customizing WordPress.  NOTE: This tutorial only covers WordPress 1.2, if you are running WordPress 2.0 this is all useless.

In this tutorial we will cover the steps necessary to use WordPress as a CMS.  This tutorial will cover the basic concepts and steps to get something up and running as quickly as possible, part 2 will cover more advanced tricks to get the most out of your WPCMS.

The first step is to identify exactly what you want to get out of a CMS, just because you can make WordPress function as a CMS doesn't mean you should.  Be sure before you begin that you are not creating more work for yourself than neccessary.

Okay so I assume since you are still with me that you have decided that a WPCMS is for you.  Now, we need to identify how your new shiny sight will be organized.  For the purposes of this tutorial lets assume that you will have the following site structure:

1. index/home page
2. colophon/information page
3. about me/about us page
4. movie/music reviews

We all set?  Good lets get going.

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Spider-man 2

Well I have now seen Spider-man 2 twice, and I must say that it stil holds up even after the initial fan-boyism has worn off.

The movie is not perfect by any means, but I think it is now officially my favorite sequel. Danger!  Danger Will Robinson!  Danger Spoilers Ahead!  Consider yourself duly warned.

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Funky Founding Fathers

So yeah, I came across this today, and just had to share it with you all.  Who knew our founding fathers knew how to throw down.

Founding Fathers, or you might enjoy Bush vs Gore instead.

How 'bout that.

I found out yesterday via one of my many stats packages that I have been listed by Matt Mullenweg aka photomatt, the lead developer on WordPress, as a "well designed WordPress blog".

It is a short list, comprised of some heavy hitters design-wise so I feel very good about being listed there.  For some really snazzy WordPress powered design check out my betters like Michael Heilemann @ binarybonsai.com, or Ethan Marcotte from sidesh0w.com and who can forget the man, the legend Mark Pilgrim who recently migrated his site to WordPress.

The other listees all have fine designs, these listed are just some of my favorites.

The nonsense that happens when you can't sleep

UPDATE: Of course the moment that I open my mouth, I find an incredible implementation of Virtual Desktops, open source no less.  If you are into this sort of thing you owe it to youself to check out Desktop Manager.  There are some fuzzy things about the UI, but since it is open source I DLed the source and I am going to massage the UI a bit to make it more Chris-friendly.

So I am up at 4:13 am, paying the price for a nap I took from around 4:30 to 7:30 or so Sunday the 4th.

A wierd thought crept into my head as I sat here listening to some tunage and surfing the web, "How cool would it be to have multiple desktops in OS X, ala every Linux desktop known to man, but with an Aqua twist?".  I looked around and there really wasn't a viable solution that I liked, that felt integrated into the system and employed the now legendary Mac-ease-of-use.

So now there are a couple of thoughts running around in my head in regards to how to implement this;

1. The first time I saw the Panther implementation of Fast User Switching I thought, Self(that is what I call myself you know.) Self I says, you tack on a nice UI that is accesable as a key combination and that could be a nice virtual desktop system.  Create as many vDesks(accounts) as you need forgoing the password option and there you have it, you could easily move left and right from your current vDesk position using something like shift-apple-arrow.
2. Then there is always bypassing the built in features of the OS and build one from scratch.
3. The last option would be to combine some of the functions of fast user switching with a couple of custom methods.

This will probably be what I do, if I decide to continue on the Virtual Desktops path.  Not sure the end result is worth the effort really.

We'll see.

More additions to the photoblog

As I promised sometime ago I have a photo section up and running and I have added the first of hopefully many images from Thursday Nights at the Inn On Applegrove.

This was a good night to start things off with since we had a fairly large group, ten in all, 12 if you count the dog and cat.  I can't really put into words how much these get-togethers mean to me; to have those that have become my family not only in the light of eternity, but that have in a very real and present way become loved ones in this life, gathered in my home to eat and laugh, there is no better way to spend an evening.

I can't think of a better way to manifest the communion we all share through partaking of the Eucharistic elements than to spend a night together when we could have all easily just stayed home.  For me this is the real test of ecclesia fortitude; meaning how do we manifest the Body outside of the temple space.  It is not really that difficult to love each other on Sunday for 3 hours; but to come together mid-week and offer that time up as a sacrifice of love is a good mark twain (see the bottom of the page for the definition) for the health and vitality of your local parish community I would think.

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