Technology, Thoughts, and Trinkets » Administration

Administrative Note: Website Refresh

Christopher — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 18:46:07 +0000

Photo by Sanja Gjenero

I’ve been testing different ways to present the content of this website for about 9 months now, testing about 50 different themes, hundreds of plugins, and learning more about the loop than I though possible. For some time the iNove theme that I used has caused me a lot of headaches: it is slow, has regularly crashed the publishing functions of my WordPress install, and hadn’t been updated by the developer in years. This last item was particularly annoying, given that these lack of updates have prevented me from taking advantage of many new features in WordPress 3.0.

After spending (literally) countless hours trying to get iNove to work and find an alternate theme, I finally decided to take the plunge on switching themes on Sunday evening. The site came down for about twenty hours (two more than initially scheduled) and has since come back. I’m using the TwentyTen theme as the underbelly of the site, with many of the CSS changes courtesy of the TwentyTen – Blogging Inside Edition child theme. The changes in the child theme have been supplemented with my own modifications. I want to quickly catalogue what I did, in case there are features that someone else wants to incorporate some of these changes into their own TwentyTen installation.

Add Favicon Support

Open header.php
In the … section insert the following code;
/favicon.ico” />

Remove Nav-Above Navigation Paths on Single Posts

Open single.php
Delete;

’ . _x( ‘←’, ‘Previous post link’, ‘twentyten’ ) . ‘ %title’ ); ?>

’. _x(‘&rarr,’, ‘Next Post link’, ‘twentyten’). ‘’); ?>

Stop Showing Tags Associated with Posts

Open loop.php
Delete: $tags_list = get_the_tag_list( ”, ‘, ‘ );
if ( $tags_list ):
?>

Tagged %2$s’, ‘twentyten’ ), ‘entry-utility-prep entry-utility-prep-tag-links’, $tags_list ); ?>

|

Stop Displaying Nav-Above Associated with All Posts

Open loop.php
Delete;
max_num_pages > 1 ) : ?>

← Older posts’, ‘twentyten’ ) ); ?>

→’, ‘twentyten’ ) ); ?>

Get Pagenavi Plugin Working

Download and activate WP-PageNavi plugin
Fine the following in loop.php;
Delete; max_num_pages > 1 ) : ?>

← Older posts’, ‘twentyten’ ) ); ?>

→’, ‘twentyten’ ) ); ?>
Add:

Move and Curve Search Form:

Open Stylesheet.css
Add: .search-form input{
margin:10px 10px 10px 0;
width: 150px;
float: right;
font-style: italic;
}
Add:

#wrapper {

-moz-border-radius: 7px; -moz-border-radius: 7px; -webkit-border-radius: 7px; -webkit-border-radius: 7px;

}

Curve Branding Image

Open Stylesheet.css
Replace;
#branding img {

clear: both;

border-top: 4px solid #000;

display: block;

border-bottom: 1px solid #000;

}
with;
#branding img {

clear : both;

display : block;

border: 1px solid #000000;

/* border-top : 13px solid #000000; */

border-bottom: 13px solid #000000 ;

/* rounding bottom of border */

border-bottom-right-radius: 13px;

border-bottom-left-radius: 13px;

-moz-border-radius-bottomright: 13px;

-moz-border-radius-bottomleft: 13px;

-webkit-border-bottom-right-radius: 13px;

-webkit-border-bottom-left-radius: 13px;}

A few other changes were made in the footer.php and other files, but they’re almost entirely cosmetic and highly particular to my own installation and sensitivities. I’m not entirely done the changes – I’m working on modifying a plugin to better display related posts, as well as a few transparency and slider effects – but all of the core work is now complete.