The Plumbers House - Blog v.03

Well, if you’ve read my Plumber’s House series you’ll notice that this blog is no longer on my company site, www.wissinks.com. I knew better than to combine too many loosely working features and functions sets together in Joomla!. I had the jd-wp Joomla! WordPress component on my company site but the jd-wp component was a little buggy and I didn’t get too many of the neat WordPress plugins to work. For instance the trackbacks and url rewriting didn’t work and I wanted the ultimate tag warrior WordPress plugins. So, instead of wasting too much time “fixing” the component to work inside of Joomla!, I quickly decided to cut and run. I was a little apprehensive about bonding my blog to my company site anyway from a marketing perspective. I still like WordPress as a blog as its administration side is very simple. The plugin API is simple and to the point and consequently the development community is vibrant and has built some really nice plugins. I’ll list the ones that I’ve installed in a subsequent post.

The first thing I was concerned with was the look and feel of my site. So after looking around a bit for a free theme that I liked I gave up. Most of the free and for pay themes are just variations of the same ole stuff that every WordPress blog has. I wanted something a little bit different, (un)fortunately, nothing surfaced. So I decided to create my own theme. I got some ok stuff developed working then I was point to free theme. Wow, this one is a cool one named Hemingway. At first it seemed a bit funky (but still very usable) but as I watched a few people use it, I realized that it’s simple, consistent, and reliable. So I just created my own css and put my own colors palette in it. I now have a theme in place.

In a nut shell, Hemingway puts the main focus of the page (read: content) on the top. On the bottom there are these blocks installed in the “Hemingway’s Bottombar^tm“. A block is a container for html snippets and php code. If you have a WordPress plugin that writes out html, eg. the blogroll on this site, then you would have to create a corresponding block for that plugin. Blocks are easy to create for people that have a minimal knowledge of PHP. Here is what the block looks like:

<ul class="blogroll">
	<?php get_links_list(1, '<h2>', '</h2>'); ?>
</ul>

The code above is fairly straight forward for those slightly familiar to WordPress plugins. The “Hemingway’s Bottombar^tm” offers a neat layer of abstraction between the theme and your plugin displays. This is advantageous because as the theme and the plugins needs to upgrade with the WordPress application your blocks and therefore your blocks and your html structure shouldn’t have to change.

Next, I knew I wanted to be able to print and email blog entries, some extra tagging functionality, SEO assistance, and comment spamming concerns. So the search started for plugins.