Maintenance: Utility Tweaks

Each of the utilities was tweaked slightly today. Everything should be functional again. I tested all of them after the tweaking. However, I may have missed a variant. If something appears broken, I’d appreciate a heads up.

The Phantom ‘Mithril Mage’

Over the last few months, I have been getting increasing numbers of people visiting based off ‘mithril mage’ as a search term. The first time I saw it mentioned was kesher’s post on the odd74 forums. Since it is becoming increasingly popular, I decided to go with the flow.

The hostname, mithrilmage.com has been registered and will point to the mithrilandmages.com domain. Quick and simple. It is a bit shorter for those who still type in urls. People like me. The shorter domain should be available within 48 hours as the update progresses to the various domain servers.

The label inspired me. So I used it to inspire someone else. The results should launch sometime in 2012.

Breakage Complete

The main task was to hack up the original theme to allow single column pages. WordPress 3.3 has issues with new page templates. Working around that took a while.

I also moved all the CSS and primary theme files into source control so I can tweak, revert, tweak again, and repeat. You know, so when I bork it completely, reversion is easy.

Things May Break

Tweaking on theme for an enhancement. By its nature its intrusive and probably should be done on a development site. I’m lazy and not going to set one up.

Things I’ve broken:

Menus

Apparently if you want to add new templates under WordPress v3.3, you have to deactivate and reactive the desired them. The unintended consequences is that the menus were lost. Along with other settings. Bleah.

Fix: Re-select the default menu under Appearance/Menus. That was easy.

A smattering of cleanup

The error causing the blog section of the site to load improperly has been correct. The cause was conflicting style sheet information in the form of widgets. Those widgets have been removed in favor of original uncomplicated theme.

The Labyrinth Lord Resource List has been divided into four different pages. Separating the elements was necessary due to the massive growth of information over the last few weeks. In addition to the growth, the information requires a better structure for maintenance. The maintenance infrastructure is not complete but should roll out soon.

Moving Day

Today is the great migration. Many of the materials I had hosted over on Gargoyle (aka moosh.net) are being transferred up to the new host. As with all moves, a few items get lost, broken or overlooked. The bulk of the items making the leap are php scripts, which are now running under a different php and web server configuration. So far, most of them migrated without issue. A couple used deprecated methods the new configuration didn’t allow. Those have been adjusted and updated to work properly. The vast majority of the materials have been moved, unpacked, and tested.

Still, some may bits of tape and packing material still attached. Tweaking everything will take time. Should you find something amiss, feel free to let me know.

Tweak and Tune: Simplo Changes

Site5‘s Simplo theme is quite nice. The theme is simple, legible, and well designed with a good menu interface. It covered most of what I wanted but not everything. I had to change a couple of minor things to fit my needs.

Categories

I like the design of the background color for categories. I didn’t like them being placed prior to the post title. So I tweaked a couple of files, index.php and single.php to drop them down below the content of the post. Both files are located in the themes directory of the blog. Normally the directory structure is something like wp-content/themes/simplo from within the installation directory of Word Press.

Once located, I had to tweak both the index.php and single.php files. The former lays out the list of posts for the index and the latter displays only a single post. Both have similar frameworks so its easy to derive the changes within the index to fit the the single post.

I shifted the category code from the top of the display to down below the content. Look for the category code within the file as:

<div class=”categs”><?php the_category(‘ ‘) ?></div>

I then moved it down to the bottom of the post below the content. Cut the noted line from the top and place it below the content display code, which is similar to this:

<?php the_content(__(‘Continue reading &raquo;’)); ?>

Titles

Making the above changes puts the author and time stamp information as the lead.  I didn’t want that either so I moved the post title to the top of the layout.   The simplo theme lingo is similar to:

<h1><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>

Just move that line above the meta layout as indicated by the meta div.

<div class=”meta”>

Tags

Finally, I wanted post tags enabled. Simplo doesn’t handle tags. It relies on the category selection, which is more prevalent. I like tags to add sub-categories I don’t have listed.  Just below the categories, I added the following:

<?php the_tags(‘Tags: ‘, ‘, ‘, ”); ?>

I haven’t added a style to the tags yet but wrapping them in a div of your own design is easily done.

Extraneous Category Commas

For some reason, the separator for the categories was listed as a comma and it ended up listing multiple commas at the end of the category list. I haven’t actually looked at the code deeply enough to determine why it was happening. Instead, I changed the calls from  the_category(‘, ‘) to simply spaces like this:  the_category(‘ ‘).

Final Results

The resulting sections I generated were as follows:

index.php

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div>

<h1><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>
<div>
<div><?php the_time(‘M j, Y’) ?></div>
<div><?php the_author_link(); ?></div>
<div><?php comments_popup_link(‘No Comments’, ’1 Comment ‘, ‘% Comments’); ?></div>
</div>

<?php the_content(__(‘Continue reading &raquo;’)); ?>
<div><?php the_category(‘ ‘) ?></div>
<?php the_tags(‘Tags: ‘, ‘, ‘, ”); ?>
</div>

single.php

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div>

<h1><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>
<div>
<div><?php the_time(‘M j, Y’) ?></div>
<div><?php the_author_link(); ?></div>
<div><?php comments_popup_link(‘No Comments’, ’1 Comment ‘, ‘% Comments’); ?></div>
</div>

<?php the_content(__(‘Continue reading &raquo;’)); ?>
<div><?php the_category(‘ ‘) ?></div>
<?php the_tags(‘Tags: ‘, ‘, ‘, ”); ?>
</div>
<?php comments_template(); ?>

Reality

I don’t have the slightest amount of visual design skills. I just am never happy with the defaults of any layout. I always want to tweak and tune it slightly. Going beyond simple changes is not something I’ll undertake. I leave that to the people with skills.