I Can Hardly Believe It
July 15th, 2008 by ComputerBob
Here it is, dinner time, and I’ve spent another full day working on getting WordPress to “fit into” this site’s look and feel.
I can hardly believe that:
- I’m still working on it.
- I’m still nowhere near being done.
- I’ve actually been able to do the things that I’ve been trying to do, even though it has taken me a long, long time to do them.
First off, I solved the problem that I described yesterday. The problem was caused by bad advice that I got from a web site. I’ve discovered that there’s way, way, way too much bad information on the Internet about the inner workings of WordPress.
Not that all of it was always bad. Some of it was probably good information at one time or another.
But there have been so many versions of WordPress — with so many under-the-hood changes over the years — that a piece of code or tweak that worked less than a year ago may not work in the current version of WordPress.
In fact, it may mess things up horribly.
So late, late last night, I discovered that the phpInclude statement that I had wasted all day yesterday trying to use to embed the WordPress “loop” into this site’s home page was the wrong one.
So I finally found the right one. In my search, I found the following two articles to be helpful in solving the problem:
- Wordpress Tutorial: How to Create a Wordpress Theme
- How To Display Wordpress content outside of your blog
Once I digested the meaning of those two articles, I was able to successfully copy the correct lines from the WordPress header.php file, my WordPress theme’s index.php file, and a couple of other files, and paste them into this site’s home page, to make the latest WordPress Journal entries appear on this site’s home page.
If you’re wondering why you didn’t see any of that happen, it’s because I’m doing it behind the scenes, using filenames and foldernames that you don’t know about.
If you’re wondering what I meant when I mentioned “the latest WordPress Journal entries,” I was referring to the fact that I’ve copied the past month’s worth of Journal entries out of my SMF-forum-based Journal and manually converted them into WordPress Journal entries.
If you remember yesterday’s Journal entry, I described two different methods to “fit” WordPress into an existing site. It turns out that I’m going to have to use both methods.
The “add-the-WordPress-loop-to-my-existing-Web-page” allows me to have this site’s home page look different than all of the other WordPress pages on this site (different header, page counter at the bottom, etc.).
The problem is that if I only used that method, then my home page would look great and would have this site’s overall look “wrapped around” my latest WordPress Journal entries, but all of my other WordPress pages (older Journal entries, search results, archive pages, etc.) would have the default WordPress look, without this site’s overall look wrapped around them.
I think I’ve finished creating this site’s new fixed-width home page with WordPress embedded into it — except that I have to recreate the home page header to work with the new fixed-width format of the rest of the page.
Once I do that, then I’ll start working on adding this site’s overall look and feel (header, navigation column, footer, etc.) to the WordPress templates themselves, using Method 1 that I described yesterday.
So, as you can see, I’ve been doing an awful lot of work on this, and I have an awful lot of work left to do on it — but I think I’m going to be really proud of the results when I finally finish it.
Of course, I’ve also installed several WordPress plugins, to add specific functions that I want to have on this site. And I’ve had to tweak some of those plugins to make them fit into the rest of this site, and to keep them from either messing anything else up, or being messed up by anything else.. It’s a long, tedious process of trial-and-error, along with testing and retesting
As always, stay tuned for more fun.
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Coding, Internet, Personal, Software, Web Development