[lug] Blog Software?

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Thu, 2006-12-07 at 10:34 -0700, David Morris wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 06, 2006 at 07:25:00PM -0700, Michael J. Hammel wrote:
> > Most of this is supported out of the box in Wordpress
> > (www.wordpress.org).  
> 
> Looks like a nice system.  The vast array of plug-ins
> available should allow most all customization I might want.
> I also know just enough PHP to royally mess up the system
> when I try and modify it to my needs. =)

The architecture of this project is very nice.  They separated core
functionality from the UI (re: theme) allowing only a modest amount of
PHP to do a heavy workload.  Turning the blog format into a more CMS
format was extremly simple.

I copied the default index.php to home.php (home gets called if it
exists, otherwise index gets called for the front page) for my
configured theme (Connections-Reloaded) and modified it so it showed a
static page (one line of PHP code to show only the page with a given
"post-slug", which is just a "name" for that page) and then copied the
original index.php to another file called discussion.php.  Then I
created a blank page (a page is created using the Wordpress UI, not
manually) that used discussion.php as it's template (index, home and
discussion are known as "templates" - index is the default template).
Instantly I have a page that displays all my blog entries.  I added a
link in the header.php for this theme that points to the new page. 

Now I have a static front page (a front door to my site, if you will)
and a banner (re: header) with a link called "Discussion" that takes the
visitor to a page that shows the typical blog-style entries.  Very CMS
like.  And the only coding I had to do was one line to the home.php and
one link entry (HTML) in the header.php.  The rest is copying files and
naming my posts with "post-slugs", which is done using the Web interface
to create pages/posts.

Very slick.

-- 
Michael J. Hammel                                    Senior Software Engineer
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org                           http://graphics-muse.org
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