widgets – Climb to the Stars

Upgrade, Shmupgrade [en]

[fr] Comme lors de chaque mise à jour wordpress, c'est la prise de tête. Plugins, thèmes... il faut vraiment que je mette de l'ordre dans mon site!

Like each time I upgrade WordPress, I find myself facing the sprawling mess that my site has become, and the umpteen hacks made to template and plugins to get things working roughly how I want them.

So I think: time to clean up! Get rid of K2! re-write plugins, so they insert fun things in my themes without me having to put them in by hand all the time!

And then it all goes down the drain, because I try one theme, and another, and another, and none really fits, and I don’t want to **yet again** go through the half-dozen addition of template tags to make my blog bilingual and shiny. But I do want it bilingual and shiny, don’t get me wrong.

I want to use sandbox. I’d like to adapt my Basic Bilingual plugin so that it injects lang="fr" and lang="en" where necessary. I want a clean layout, and I still like my [blue header image of Ouchy](http://flickr.com/photos/bunny/83450335/) (pronounce “ooshee”, please).

I have tons of things in the sidebar, and they need to be laid out so they don’t look too cluttered (a challenge, yes, I know).

I want my tag pages to link to technorati, maybe show my flickr photos with the same tag, or my del.icio.us links.

I want [ajax-ification](http://flickr.com/photos/bunny/1306106896/) so that I can correct spelling mistakes and add/remove tags without going to the admin interface ([Inline Tag Thing](http://www.neato.co.nz/wordpress-things/inline-tag-thing/) looks promising, but I’m not sure I like the interface).

Sigh.

Maybe I should just start a CTTS design contest. Give out prizes. Something like that.

Or stop wanting to push my blogging tool where it isn’t yet? I don’t want to give up.

**Update:** for the curious, the temporary design is [Diurnal](http://www.sndbx.org/results/designs/diurnal/), a sandbox skin. The colours change with the time of day — pretty neat in my opinion.

Large Footer Lust [en]

[fr] C'est décidé, je veux un large pied de page à remplir de widgets, comme ceux qu'on voit de plus en plus dans les thèmes WordPress.

It’s official. I want a large footer I can stuff full of [widgets](http://widgets.wordpress.com/), like the one I see over at [Ordered List](http://orderedlist.com/). Anybody added one to [K2](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2006/09/09/k2/)?

Getting good at short posts, ain’t I?

Blog Design: Big Footers [en]

[fr] Je commence à voir l'intérêt des immenses pieds de pages que l'on voit sur certains blogs, et qui servent en fait de sidebar secondaire. Je me demande s'il existe une modification du thème K2 qui offre ça (widgets à la clé, bien sûr).

Just a note to say I’m starting to see the interest of big footers with “secondary content” stuffed into them. Look at [this slightly extreme example](http://yeksoon.neusteps.com/?p=63).

Are there any K2 mods around with big bad-ass widgetised footers?

The hAtomisation of CTTS [en]

[fr] Un pas vers l'implémentation du microformat hAtom sur Climb to the Stars. J'ai commencé à adapter le thème WordPress Sandbox, qui est déjà tout plein de hAtom, pour que le résultat ressemble à ce que vous avez l'habitude de voir ici.

Par la même occasion, j'ai commencé à transformer ma sidebar en widgets -- c'est comme des petits blocs de construction qu'on peut ensuite assembler à sa guise, sans mettre les doigts dans le code.

Well, I’ve made good progress. Starting with the [Sandbox theme](http://www.plaintxt.org/themes/sandbox/), I imported and converted most of the CSS from my pink theme into a Sandbox skin. It’s not quite there yet.

I edited the function (provided with the theme) which generates navigation links so that it would show the few links I wanted instead of my huge list of pages. Then, there are a few things which are not in the right order in the Sandbox template for me to make them appear where I want. For example, I had to swap entry-title and entry-date so that the date of the post would float at the top right as it does here. Then, I had to add my own personal stuff: the lang attribute on the hentry div. The “other-excerpt” block, the technorati cosmos link, the tags, the trackback url at the bottom of the post. Phew.

I also installed the [widgets plugin](http://automattic.com/code/widgets/) and started converting my sidebar to [widgets](http://widgets.wordpress.com/). Great fun! But still not quite there yet either. The first difficulty was understanding that widgets are plugins and need to be activated before they appear in the widgets pool.

If you embark on a similar adventure, get the [Exec PHP widget](http://ottodestruct.com/blog/2006/04/09/fun-with-widgets/) first. You can literally paste your current sidebar into it. You’re allowed nine instances of it, once you find that you can select that number lower down on the widgets page. [Drop-down archive widget](http://tech.windsofstorm.net/wordpress/drop-archive-widget/) is nice. Sadly, [Show coComments](http://irgeek.net/projects/show-cocomments/) doesn’t seem to like apostrophes as a title, and there’s obviously something else wrong too — it worked briefly for me, but then stopped working. Didn’t manage to figure out why despite over half an hour of troubleshooting. Oh, and while I was at it, I uncovered a [small glitch in the coComment Enhancer plugin](http://www.andare.ch/blog/2006/05/cocomment-enhancer-wordpress-plugin-v12b/#comment-5817) — if your blog URL and wordpress install URLs are different, you might want to patch up your version (it’s really easy).

Tag: widgets

Large Footer Lust [en]

Similar Posts:

Blog Design: Big Footers [en]

Similar Posts:

The hAtomisation of CTTS [en]

Similar Posts: