Tune in tonight at the NH-ICC for the meeting of the Seacoast WordPress Developers Group. I’ll be talking about WordPress backups. See my slides (and outline) with complete notes and links at http://www.tedroche.com/papers.html.
Want to attend tonight or a future meeting? Meetup details here.
On April 6th, the Seacoast WordPress Developer’s Group met at the New Hampshire Innovation Commercialization Center to talk WordPress. Networking and casual conversation started around 6:30, with the meeting formally starting at 7 PM with a round of introductions:
Dave – former Cold Fusion, ETL, new to WordPress,
Carl Eric Johnson – web developer, WordPress instructor and eveloper, fan of Thesis framework.
Amanda – BIL doing Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress
Sharon, Rye Public Library, Technology Coordinator, just launched a freshened site on April 1st using WordPress and Atahualpa theme/framework.
Will, a graphic designer in a print shop who’d been encouraged to learn web design and now WordPress.
Book recommendations:
Amanda praised the Wrox Professional WordPress book.
Carl Eric has enjoyed WordPress: Visual QuickStart Guide to get up and running, and WordPress Bible(Aaron Barzell) from Wiley as a reference.
Main Presentation: Carl Eric Johnson: talk about themes and frameworks
Sitepoint.com Wicked WordPress Themes book has free sample download chapter. Table of contents points out the choices of custom themes, child themes, building a framework.
Child themes: load with parent’s theme files, in your child file, you import the parent, then override what’s different.
In WordPress 3.0, theme TwentyTen has a lot of options built in. Thesis and Atahualpa have a number of pages of options: sizing, features, colors, styles, etc.
Amanda talked about file structures and “the loop” – directories of wp-admin and wp-install are pretty much off-limits, containing the installed WordPress files and overwritten up updates; wp-content contains most everything else, including the stuff you customize. Add your own functions.php and copy the functions you want to override. A theme consists of index.php and style.css as a minimum; you can add as much as you want from there. See the Codex for the hierarchy of theme files WordPress looks for in order to render your content. Consider starting with a “blank” theme if you’re building your own, such as Starkers or Boilerplate themes – essentially stripped-down skeletal themes with all of the style removed.
See http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Hierarchy for a description of how WordPress selects the correct template(s).
See http://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop_in_Action for an overview of the loop.
A new version of WordPress is available, and I’ve updated the blog to version 3.1 and downgraded it again. It seems like some of my custom hacks didn’t make the transition as smooth as I’d like. A good lesson there: always make backups; they’re handy for quick rollbacks. Check out some of the new features, listed here.
It appears that the Header Image Rotator (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twenty-ten-header-rotator/) is the problem. I’ve disabled it, got the update working, re-enabled it and it broke again. Sure enough. I’ve let the author know about the problem and the error messages in my logs. Let’s hope for a painless fix. In the meantime, I’ll post a favorite old picture of mine, taken on a cold snowy night.
Organizer Amanda Giles announced a second meeting of the Seacoast WordPress Developers Group:
When: Wednesday, March 2, 2011 7:00 PM
Where: NH-Innovation Commercialization Center, 75 Rochester Avenue, Portsmouth, NH 03801
Why: Let’s get together for another meetup. More details coming soon. Please send me your suggestions or ideas for things you would like to share or see shared.
CMS Learning Curves