Hi, please

white it out

Hey all, I just wanted to post a revised version of the mockup I presented in class today. I made some changes to reflect today’s feedback including: changing the opaque white bands into regular white bands, substituting a solid white background for the opaque patterned one, thickening the lines that frame the ‘Recent Album Art’ and ‘Recent Video’ headings, and, finally, darkening the body text to increase readability. 

Having made these changes I’m kinda torn now about which design I like better, though I’m leaning towards the new, whiter version. Anywho, I know we’re all super busy these days, but if you get a chance I’d appreciate any feedback about one or the other. Thanks and happy coding :)

By khurry 23:52, Dec 9th, 08 #2-Wordpress 2 Comments

My WordPress Questions

I also had a few questions about WordPress that we didn’t have time to answer in today’s class.

  1. We touched on it in Class a bit with Karen’s site but never came to a solution. Currently i have the Navigation in the white strip inside header.php. No matter what page you visit this looks the same. I was hoping to have the section you were currently on be highlighted. That part seems fairly simple but in addition to changing the look of the section title i was hoping to have a accordion type effect where for example the WORK section would extend to show a submenu, consisting of 3 or 4 links. I know i can achieve this through taking the navigation out of the header.php and including it individually on each page template. I’m pretty sure there is a much more “elegant” way of doing this that i am missing.
  2. In the BLOG section when you are in a “single page” you have the option to click “next post” and “prev post” and they are working as i would like. Since I am using the query_post fuction to hide all of the posts that are filed under the category “portfolio”, the next and prev buttons still find those “portfolio” posts (which dont even follow the same “single” template, which causes you to leave the blog unexpectedly).

I have searched around briefly but thought i would post to see if someone knew the answers to these questions before i spent hours looking for solutions. I’m almost there!

Thanks,

By Ed Nacional #2-Wordpress 1 Comment

Questions about WordPress

As we are moving away from wordpress in the next two weeks , I’d like to get a few questions answered that we were not able to address today. These are some things that I have worked on for a while, and still can’t seem to figure out:

1. This is totally stumping me, I wrote about it in an e-mail a couple days ago: on my home page (index.php) I’d like to insert a line below the read more/date/comments line to act as a separator between posts. But, as I mentioned before, the ‘Read more’ is acting strangely because it is a parameter of the_content, so it makes it difficult to group the elements together into an entry-meta div that I could then apply a border to. I tried various techniques (the remnants of some are still probably in my code, but they didn’t work). Can I get help placing a line below that seciton? Maybe I’m missing something totally obvious.

2. I can’t seem to select comment-author vcard (in my comments section, the author of the post) in order to apply styles to it. It doesn’t take any of my selectors. ack. this seems so simple, I’m almost embarassed to write it.

3. I created a new template page for info about my headers, and successfully used a query post php code to make it only display posts tagged with ‘header’. But, when I went to filter my index.php so it would exclude posts tagged with ‘header’, all the code I tried didn’t work (in codex, it doesn’t say anything about excluding posts of a given tag, it only talks about including them – i tried making stuff up but it didn’t work). I ended up getting it to work using category exclusion, meaning that now I am tagging those posts with ‘header’ and also giving them the category ‘header’. I’d just like to use tags…

Ok, those are the main things. The rest I can do – still have some formatting left on some pages. But I also have some less pressing questions—things I’ve encountered during the countless hours I’ve spent with this:

1. My sidebar.php file doesn’t seem to correspond to my sidebar’s current state…It doesn’t correctly reflect the order of widgets that I am using. Why is this?

2. I tried to style a tooltip but couldn’t figure how to select that element. I tried to read about it online, thought I had found the answer, it didn’t work.

3. I wanted to create an html span in one of my posts in order to style something in there like an h3. It didn’t read the html like I wanted, it just displayed the code.

ok, that’s it, I should be good after this, everything else is making sense. Sorry for this super long post. Also, Mushon, just wanted to let you know I really appreciate your attentiveness and willingness to answer all our questions. Knowing I can get help if I reach a roadblock really makes the whole process fun and comfortable rather than scary (which it definitely would be with a different teacher). so thanks.

By Alexandra Uncategorized 4 Comments

Getting serious with Indexhibit

Today in class we make plans to get the Indexhibit work done within the next two weeks. Each one of you will comment to this post with a commitment to what you intend to do by next week.
Current options (we can expand this list):

  • Write a css plugin
  • Write comments for the css code
  • Do a screencast of how to install Indexhibit
  • Do a screencast of how to use Indexhibit
  • Do a screencast of how to modify Indexhibit (maybe using Firebug too)
  • Write a post(s) to document our efforts
  • Float our user interface and accessibility concerns to the Indexhibit community (on the forums) and follow up the discussion to fix it.
  • more…

As the semester is neerly done, and since you guys seem to be much more in control of your WordPress stuff, I think we should feel safe to swich gears and focus our attention on our OSD project – our class legacy…

By Mushon #3-OSD briefs 3 Comments

a new mockup…

This is the current version of my blog design that I’m working under. Coding is under way but I have come accross a number of technical issues that I hope we can work out in class. As far as the design goes, I attempted to break it free from the imfamous “orange boxes” that had been dogging my earlier designs by eliminating the boxes altogether to create a more open feel to the content sections.

Aside from altering the color scheme and eliminating the boxes, I took Mushon’s advice and turned the scribble pattern into a background image at super-low opacity. In turn, I chose to frame the section titles with the non-opaque versions of the scribble pattern to maintain graphical consistancy even when scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page. These “title bars” also mimic the design of the page header in their use of both the color patterns and the washed out white band that travels across them.

Finally, I eliminated the secondary nav menu (the one with links to my portfolio exhibits) and instead decided to include just a single link back to my portfolio so as to solve the problem of dealing with two vertical nav menus. In place of the portfolio navigation I added a weekly playlist chart that can be easily customized and embedded via last.fm–this was part of my original proposal and I’m happy to have found a way to fit it in.

By khurry Uncategorized No Comments

Getting the first image from a WordPress post

Here’s a WordPress code snippets I thought you might find useful. It is a functions you can dump in functions.php and then use in your theme. This one would get you the first image from any post you pass it. This is a great way for you guys to get thumbnails for your posts without extra effort. Here we go:

Snippet

Paste this code into anywhere in your functions.php file

function get_first_image($post_ID, $fullsize=false, $max_dims=false){
	$thumbargs = array(
	'post_type' => 'attachment',
	'post_status' => null,
	'post_parent' => $post_ID
	);
	$thumbs = get_posts($thumbargs);
	if ($thumbs) {
		$num = count($thumbs)-1;
		return get_attachment_innerHTML($thumbs[$num]->ID, $fullsize, $max_dims);
	}
}

Parameters

This function expects to be passed three parameters: $post_ID The ID of the post you want the first image for (you can get it easily from the loop for example) $fullsize Are you trying to refer to the full size image? [true] or to the thumbnail [false]. Default: false $max_dims Do you want to make the image resize proportionally? If so, pass a single number [300] to limit it equally on both height and width or pass an array of two values, width and height [array(300,200)] to have different height and width size limits. If you don’t want to limit size pass false. [false] Default: false

Returns

This function would return the img tag with the alt tag, image resizing and all. So putting this in your theme:

get_first_image (35, true, array(300, 350));

Might return this:

  <img title="my image title" src="http://artfocus.org.il/en/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/durham-jd_coll-stones_brasilian2.jpg" alt="my image description" width="300" />

In this case http://artfocus.org.il/en/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/durham-jd_coll-stones_brasilian2.jpg is the full sized image, and being of landscape proportions it is being its size is being resized to proportionally fit the 300px width. If it would have been a vertical image, it might have resized by the 350px height and then its width might resize to less than 300px. Enjoy.

Thanks

Thanks to Crerem and Ben Colman, for providing bug report and patches to the code (thrugh the comments)

By Mushon #2-Wordpress FYI class notes 7 Comments

Notes from Portfolio Class

  • Exhibition formats are hidden while in the “Advanced mode” is set to off (Default is set to off). Only 4 formats are available on first install.
  • Settings/Preferences Buttons
  • The way the Title and Caption is displayed differently per Exhibition Format
  • “site” folder isn’t a very intuitive name
  • Once you choose a exhibition specific background color there is no way to delete it.
  • On Ed’s “commented” theme it currently says Navigation – Left Side. Which may not always be the case.
  • Do we want to have credit for our work in the somewhere? CSS comment??
  • Comment the index.php??
  • Create a DIV and easy way to insert and style image/logo
By Ed Nacional 11:38, Dec 5th, 08 #3-OSD No Comments

OK Indexhibit, let’s make you better

Indexhibit:

  • Write a CSS Plugin for Indexhibit, please communicate with the rest of us what your plugin will be about.
  • Chip in on the documentation for the Sandbox theme
  • Let’s communicate about our Friday gig.

WordPress:

  • Start diving into plugins.
  • Make your theme links url independent.
  • Upload content to your blog.
  • Get ready to finish this thing.

Enjoy

By Mushon 12:30, Dec 2nd, 08 #2-Wordpress #3-OSD briefs No Comments

blog mockup

By khurry Uncategorized No Comments

happy (belated) turkey day

i have worked on my wordpress to make it look like my design (below)

basically i worked on the header, index, footer and sidebar pages. there is still lots of work to be done. sigh.

this weekend i am going to put up some posts to start working on what those will end up looking like…

take a look: blog so far

By karenm 16:54, Nov 28th, 08 Uncategorized 3 Comments