Trying something new here with the layout. I spent some time yesterday browsing Wordpress themes and stumbled on ‘elegant-grunge’ by Michael Tyson.

I’ve still got a decent sized punch-list before the conversion is complete (mostly formatting consistency, etc.). I’ve also got some work yet to do under the hood with my custom page layouts (the photo page, etc). They’ll stay offline until I get everything straightened out.

3/19/09 Update: Couple of minor tweaks to make (resizing my header images, etc) and I think I’m done with the bulk of the formatting and integration issues.

Whoa. Total interface change. I’m keyed on horizontal menus in ver. 2.6 and now everything is vertical with drop-downs. I do like new dashboard but it’s going to take a few days to get used to the layout changes.

Upgrade went smooth and it doesn’t look like any of my plugins choked so I guess at the moment, I’ve got no real complaints about ver. 2.7

You can check out WordPress and the WordPress Community here.

Nothing kills your day (or night in some cases) quicker then spending a couple hours trying to track down solutions to coding problems. Especially when you’re not really an expert on the stuff you’re trying to cludge together. Since I learn most of my code-foo via reverse engineering, it takes me a bit longer to fix something when it goes wrong. I usually lack the fundamental understanding of the code I’m working with until I’m forced to dig into the code to fix it. Yea I know, it’s a somewhat back-asswards way of teaching yourself a new programming language but it works for me.

I knocked out two today – the first one involves a fix I’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks and the second was a 2 min quickie.

Fix #1
In a nut shell, apparently $query_post does not pass paging information into the main post loop so if you customize your post display using something like:

< ?php $query_post('cat=-1') ?>

You end up with a working post filter but broken page links. My [first $query_post fix failed] but after a couple more hours wading through Google searches, I stumbled across this:
[$query_post paging work-around].

Bingo. My thanks goes out to guys way smarter than me.

Fix #2
This one was easy. I noticed my quicktag

< --more-->

was being ignored by [WordPress] when it parsed my custom page templates. A quick Google search [gave me the solution]:

< ?php global $more; $more=0; the_content(); ?>

By declaring the global variable $more and turning it on with “0″ (“1″ is off), you force WP into parsing the [the_content()] template tag in conjunction with the quicktag.

On the off chance you stumble into this post while searching for an obscure [WordPress] bug, look no further. After 5 minutes of [Wordpress template tag codex] searching on the properties of the $query_posts tag, you can fix an issue with the “Next & Previous” page links failing to advance the main page by replacing this:

< ?php query_posts('cat=-8'); ?>

with this:

< ?php query_posts($query_string.'$cat=-8'); ?>

Footnote: After reading through my original post, I realized how absolutely retarded it was. Not sure why I even blogged about it. So I cut out all the crap and just posted the code fix. I’m pretty sure nobody cares but I needed something to post and this is about exciting as things get when I start goofing with PHP.

Update 08/06/08:
This ‘bug’ is has become more difficult to fix than I originally thought. I’m still trying to figure out how to get a filter applied to my main page without breaking the nav links.