Administrative Note: Website Refresh

/ Christopher Parsons

Photo by Sanja Gjenero

I’ve been testing different ways to present the content of this website for about 9 months now, testing about 50 different themes, hundreds of plugins, and learning more about the loop than I though possible. For some time the iNove theme that I used has caused me a lot of headaches: it is slow, has regularly crashed the publishing functions of my WordPress install, and hadn’t been updated by the developer in years. This last item was particularly annoying, given that these lack of updates have prevented me from taking advantage of many new features in WordPress 3.0.

After spending (literally) countless hours trying to get iNove to work and find an alternate theme, I finally decided to take the plunge on switching themes on Sunday evening. The site came down for about twenty hours (two more than initially scheduled) and has since come back. I’m using the TwentyTen theme as the underbelly of the site, with many of the CSS changes courtesy of the TwentyTen – Blogging Inside Edition child theme. The changes in the child theme have been supplemented with my own modifications. I want to quickly catalogue what I did, in case there are features that someone else wants to incorporate some of these changes into their own TwentyTen installation.

Add Favicon Support

  1. Open header.php
  2. In the <head> … </head> section insert the following code;
    <link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’); ?>/favicon.ico” />

Remove Nav-Above Navigation Paths on Single Posts

  1. Open single.php
  2. Delete; <div id=”nav-above” class=”navigation”>
    <div class=”nav-previous”><?php previous_post_link( ‘%link’, ‘<span class=”meta-nav”>’ . _x( ‘&larr;’, ‘Previous post link’, ‘twentyten’ ) . ‘</span> %title’ ); ?></div>
    <div class=”nav-next”><?php next_post_link(‘%link’, ‘%title <span class=”meta-nav”>’. _x(‘&rarr,’, ‘Next Post link’, ‘twentyten’). ‘</span>’); ?></div>
    </div><!–#nav-above–>

Stop Showing Tags Associated with Posts

  1. Open loop.php
  2. Delete: <?php
    $tags_list = get_the_tag_list( ”, ‘, ‘ );
    if ( $tags_list ):
    ?>
    <span class=”tag-links”>
    <?php printf( __( ‘<span>Tagged</span> %2$s’, ‘twentyten’ ), ‘entry-utility-prep entry-utility-prep-tag-links’, $tags_list ); ?>
    </span>
    <span class=”meta-sep”>|</span>
    <?php endif; ?>

Stop Displaying Nav-Above Associated with All Posts

  1. Open loop.php
  2. Delete; <?php /* Display navigation to next/previous pages when applicable */ ?>
    <?php if ( $wp_query->max_num_pages > 1 ) : ?>
    <div id=”nav-above” class=”navigation”>
    <div class=”nav-previous”><?php next_posts_link( __( ‘<span>&larr;</span> Older posts’, ‘twentyten’ ) ); ?></div>
    <div class=”nav=next”><?php previous_posts_link( __( ‘Newer posts <span>&rarr;</span>’, ‘twentyten’ ) ); ?></div>
    </div><!– #nav-above –>
    <?php endif; ?>

Get Pagenavi Plugin Working

  1. Download and activate WP-PageNavi plugin
  2. Fine the following in loop.php; <?php /* Display navigation to next/previous pages when applicable */ ?>
  3. Delete; <?php if ( $wp_query->max_num_pages > 1 ) : ?>
    <div id=”nav-above” class=”navigation”>
    <div class=”nav-previous”><?php next_posts_link( __( ‘<span class=”meta-nav”>←</span> Older posts’, ‘twentyten’ ) ); ?></div>
    <div class=”nav-next”><?php previous_posts_link( __( ‘Newer posts <span class=”meta-nav”>→</span>’, ‘twentyten’ ) ); ?></div>
    </div><!– #nav-above –>
    <?php endif; ?>
  4. Add: <?php wp_pagenavi(); ?>

Move and Curve Search Form:

  1. Open Stylesheet.css
  2. Add: .search-form input{
    margin:10px 10px 10px 0;
    width: 150px;
    float: right;
    font-style: italic;
    }
  3. Add:
    #wrapper {
    -moz-border-radius: 7px; -moz-border-radius: 7px; -webkit-border-radius: 7px; -webkit-border-radius: 7px;
    }

Curve Branding Image

  1. Open Stylesheet.css
  2. Replace;
    #branding img {
    clear: both;
    border-top: 4px solid #000;
    display: block;
    border-bottom: 1px solid #000;
    }
  3. with;
    #branding img {
    clear : both;
    display : block;
    border: 1px solid #000000;
    /* border-top : 13px solid #000000; */
    border-bottom: 13px solid #000000 ;
    /* rounding bottom of border */
    border-bottom-right-radius: 13px;
    border-bottom-left-radius: 13px;
    -moz-border-radius-bottomright: 13px;
    -moz-border-radius-bottomleft: 13px;
    -webkit-border-bottom-right-radius: 13px;
    -webkit-border-bottom-left-radius: 13px;}

A few other changes were made in the footer.php and other files, but they’re almost entirely cosmetic and highly particular to my own installation and sensitivities. I’m not entirely done the changes – I’m working on modifying a plugin to better display related posts, as well as a few transparency and slider effects – but all of the core work is now complete.