I had a productive weekend. Michael was gone friday evening and most of the day Saturday, so I had a lot of computer alone time. I spent it working on 13thHour.net.
My idea was to get wordpress up and running as a “blog/news” front page of the site, and then using that same theme to make the rest of the pages on the site look the same. I played around with using wordpress for the entire site, but I wasn’t able to have the customization of page filenames that I wanted.
In the end I pretty much took the default theme, copied it to a new theme directory and modified it so that it has the old 13thHour page look to it. It took about 4-5 hours for me to get used to the whole structure of wordpress and modify what I needed to theme-wise, but it was pretty easy. I’m very impressed with how nicely structured wordpress is, the authors are very neat coders.
Once the theme work was done I had to get my hands dirty. I wanted to have member profile pages on the site, like the old site, but I didn’t want to have to maintain them myself. With the old site most of the profiles were out-dated, people would sometimes email me to update them and it was such a pain. So I was either going to do away with profiles entirely, or implement some way to let people do them themselves. This was my Sunday work.
I knew that there was profile information, put in through the admin interface, but where was it kept and displayed? Was there a page for it? As far as I could tell there wasn’t. And when you clicked on an author from wp_users_list it brought you to a list of all their posts. What a useless link! Luckily many people agree, and I was able to find some code on the wordpress site that let me make this into a profile page instead of a list of the user’s archives. Nice.
The only issue with it is that the wp_users_list command will only link to users if they’ve ever posted anything (since it links to their archives by default – no archives, no link), so if I use that all users will need to post something – not a huge problem, I am just telling everyone to post an “I made my profile!” post once they have. I’m not sure I’ll continue to use wp_users_list though, as all users have their own id number, and I could just manually create a list and update it when someone else is added. We’ll see.
Next step was to customize the fields for the profile page. I found a page that described how to add Jabber IM to it (very silly that it doesn’t have this as a field, it has AIM, YIM, ICQ and MSN..). I used this solution to add all the fields I needed: Birthday, Image link, Public Email, etc. This was the most exciting part of the whole project %) I don’t have the exact notes on how to do it with me, but I think I’ll post info about all the customizations I’ve made, if only for my reference, it was all pretty easy though.
By Sunday evening I had a working site installed on my primary workstation. Michael set up everything on the server and moved things over for me, then set up DNS. Around 8:30 last night we had DNS pointing to the shiney new site!
And now it’s up and running. I’m asking members to email (lyz@princessleia.com) or /msg me if they want an account. I want everyone in channel to have one, so they’ll have profiles, but I don’t have everyone’s current email addresses, so I need to be told so I can set up an account. And if people haven’t responded after a couple weeks I’ll start hunting them down to get their information %)
I’m so excited, it’s been almost 2 years since I’ve launched a new site with it’s own domain name.
But I didn’t spend *all* weekend on this.
Saturday I called up
about 15 minutes from my house and wanted to know if I wanted to join them. Sure! So I hung out with them and some people I’d met before at one of
It was after 1am when I got home, Michael still wasn’t home so I went to bed.
Non-computer-stuff Sunday was spent baking and cleaning.
We had some blueberries in the refrigerator that I bought for pancakes, but we never ended up making pancakes because it’s been too hot and yucky out to do morning cooking lately. But I needed to do something with the blueberries because they were close to going bad. So I went looking for a blueberry bread recipe. I found a pretty basic one that called for milk, water, flour, sugar and small amounts of the regular baking stuff. Unfortunately I ran out of milk, the recipe wanted 1 1/3 cup and I only had about 2/3 cup, so I hoped that making up the difference with water would be OK. It baked up nicely (have I mentioned that I love my new oven thermometer?) and smelled like blueberries. Unfortunately it mostly tastes like blueberries and flour (big surprise!). Oh well, I like blueberries and flour, especially with some butter on top. I’ll just find a better recipe next time.
Then I cleaned the house. Because of the heat we’ve not been doing the “big weekend cleanings” that we usually do, instead just doing spot cleaning as needed. So I finally did the big cleaning again. Got all the floors mopped and all. It was still too hot though, I was pretty tired from the heat afterwards. Oh I hate the summer!
Sunday night we drove up to Rita’s and got some yummie cold treats. I got a Cherry water ice + vanilla ice cream gelati and Michael got some Mango waterice. It was all good %d nice end to the weekend.