"This Site" Category

During my recent them upgrade I had some challenges with the Now Reading Reloaded plugin for WordPress and the frustrating “HTTP 500: Internal Server Error” messages. This took me on a journey of exploration into how the php modules used by WordPress and its plugins ended up as HTML on my browser and what logs were available to help me diagnose the 500 error.

The following article looks at how the pieces fit together in a typical Apache/PHP deployment (for WordPress and other PHP-based applications) and then shows how the pieces can be used to identify code problems….
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Here’s a challenge… the WordPress “Add New Post” page that I’m currently using to type this post into has a button labeled “code“. If you select a chunk of code (such as the CSS I’ll put later) it wraps the <code> and <\code> tags around it. Depending on the CSS you have mapped to the code tag, you will get a nicely displayed piece of code in your blog. But there’s a catch; you can’t get a solid box/background just by using the default code tags. You need to add the <pre> and <\pre> tags as well….
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When redesigning my theme, I wanted to include a standard set of “share” links (or “social links” or “story tools”) for the posts and pages, featuring the usual print, email, rss and social-bookmarking links. Many people use the Sociable and ShareThis plugins for all of these, but I wanted to have a structure with separate links for each.

This article is a walk-through of creating two styles of “share” links, an inline set of links and a box (that also contains my tags).
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One of the great things about WordPress is the plethora of plugins that the user community has developed to extend and enhance the basic blog functionality. Some plugins, such as WP-PluginsUsed, are simple and add a function or two you can embed in a page and are implemented as a single php file. Others, such as Now Reading Reloaded, provide significant functionality and involve many files.

Some plugins are purely for administration of the blog, such as Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu, whereas others provide functionality viewable to your readers. I have found the need to tweak some of these, sometimes for look’n'feel, sometimes for functionality. But managing modified plugins can be a challenge. This article looks at the common areas of customisation and how they can be managed.
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One of the key drivers for changing the theme was to break out of the “boxiness” that was common to many themes available. The old theme, and many that are available consist of a main box for all the content (so the blog is in the middle of the page and not stretched to fit the browser window) and then a few standard boxes within it: a header across the top, a footer across the bottom, and the content and a sidebar filling the space in the middle.

I was looking for something that had a bit of overlap and a background that appeared to flow out of the content. Achieving this was a bit of a challenge. This post describes how I achieved the layout I wanted and the CSS I had to use to get there…
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