I Can Hardly Stand It
July 14th, 2008 by ComputerBob
I spent the whole day today trying to get WordPress to “fit into” the rest of this site. And I’m completely exhausted, frustrated and disgusted.
Don’t get me wrong. WordPress is very powerful, very friendly software — if you don’t already have a huge, complicated site like this one.
If you already have a huge web site and you just want to add WordPress to it in a way that makes it look like the rest of your site, then it’s a huge pain.
Basically, I have found two ways to try to include a WordPress blog within existing pages:
- Carefully add your header, footer, and navigation column codes to WordPress’ page templates.
- Add the WordPress “loop” to your existing web page, to display recent WordPress posts “inside” your web page.From the number of articles that I’ve found on the subject, it appears that most people do the first option — that is, they open 3 different WordPress template files and carefully add parts of their own web page design’s code to those files.
The problem is that if I do that, whatever code I add is going to appear on every single WordPress page. So I’m going to have The Windows and Linux icons, the dynamically changing Florida photo, “Welcome To ComputerBob.com” and a funny quote at the top of all of my WordPress pages, and I’ll have a page counter at the bottom of all of my WordPress pages.
So I decided to try to do the second method — to add the WordPress “loop” to this site’s existing home page.
That was easy. It took less than 30 minutes to figure out exactly how to do it.
But then it took 10 1/2 more hours (so far) after that, to try to work out all of the problems that it caused.
First of all, imagine 10 1/2 hours of CSS hell. WordPress uses several different CSS stylesheets, and each widget (calendar, tag cloud, recent posts, etc.) uses an additional stylesheet of its own. Even with the help of the Firefox Web Developer add-on, it was all I could do to try to track down the source of some of the weird display abnormalities that I ran into.
When I finally finished getting it all to look the way I wanted about an hour ago. I was really happy to be within a few hours of taking WordPress “live” on this site!
But then I ran into what could end up being a deal-breaking problem with the phpIncluded WordPress header — which is apparently REQUIRED in order to display recent WordPress posts on this site’s home page. No matter what I try, I haven’t been able to figure out how to stop it from including an extraneous DOCTYPE declaration right in the middle of the code of this site’s home page. The problem has been that it seems impossible to separate that DOCTYPE statement — which I don’t need and which causes XHTML validation errors — from the rest of the phpIncluded WordPress header that I need in order to display recent WordPress posts on this site’s home page.
So now it’s back to Google, to try to find a solution. If I can’t find a way to get it to work the way it’s supposed to, then my entire day’s work today will have been a big, frustrating waste of time, and I’ll end up spending a few more days trying the other, less flexible method for getting WordPress to fit into this site.
Stay tuned.
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Coding, Personal, Software, Web Development