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.