r3dux.org

WordPress is a really nice WCMS and I’ve been really happy with it ever since I first migrated over back in February ’09, but it definitely has some limitations with regard to how you can structure your site.

Let’s take an example: Joe Blow has a site on hunting, camping and fishing – he writes regular articles on each of these specific categories, and he wants these posts to turn up either just in the specific Hunting/Camping/Fishing pages he’s created, or he wants them to turn up on the home page and also in the category specific pages.

I came up against this problem when I wanted to import a bunch of articles from back when I ran r3dux.org on PHP-Nuke – I didn’t want the “new” (i.e. imported from Nuke) posts cluttering up the home page of the site, I wasn’t going to run the old Nuke portal because it’s full of deprecated code & security flaws – but I wanted the old posts added and available from an “Old Site” page which I could put in the header – so how do we go about this? Easily – via a couple of useful plugins!

Definitions

Before we continue, it’s worth spelling out exactly how WordPress defines Posts, Pages and Categories so we don’t get our terminology all mixed up and make things harder than they have to be:

• A Post is a single article entry, with at least one category (even if that category is the “uncategorised” category!) and may optionally contain some some tags which are keywords for the article.
• A Page is a static, single post which can be easily be linked into the header of your site. It does not contain other posts – it is simply a single post with a special tag that makes it easy to link in the header, and is commonly used to put information about the website author, FAQs, contact pages etc.
• A Category is a database field associated with an article to categorise it, such “Hunting”, “Fishing”, “Humour”, “Politics” etc. You usually set up a bunch of categories, and then select one or more of them to categorise your article, so for a funny joke about fishing, you might have the post categorised with both the “Fishing” and “Humour” categories, and you can then select to view all posts which are classified as this category or that category in a single page (or all posts of some category, showing 5/10/20 posts at a time etc.).

The Fix

This is all well and good – but it’s this static, single post nature of Pages that what’s so unintuitive and can easily trip us up – we can’t link to categories from a page (well, you can, but you have to link from inside the static page, and then you just get a list of article links – which sucks), so we need something to be able to do that for us – and this is where the plugins come in. Specifically we’re going to be using:

• Mark Jaquith’s Page Links To plugin, and
• The RYO Category Visibility plugin [optional - get the beta version from the bottom of the post to use with WordPress 3.01 and higher!]

In combination these two plugins will set a page (i.e. header link) so that instead of it going to a single static “Page”, it instead links to a category list of posts of a given category, and (if you want to) additionally stop posts assigned to specific category from turning up on the main “home” page…

Installing and Configuring

1. Go to both of the above links and download the WordPress plugin .zip file from each (you don’t need the category visibility plugin if you don’t want to hide posts from the main “home” page)
2. Log in to your WordPress dashboard and click on the Plugins link in the left administration bar, then click the Add New button at the top and point it at a plugin .zip file and click upload. Once it’s uploaded and installed, don’t forget to activate each plugin. Do both plugins if you want them…
3. To use the Page Links To plugin you just create a new page (or edit an existing one) and right at the bottom of the WordPress page where you enter the “Page” details, you’ll see this section:

   

   You can fill in the URL to be anything you like, so in my case I’m linking to a list of all posts in the “Old-Site” category – you can link any category or specific post on your site, or link to http://www.google.com or http://news.bbc.co.uk – it’s entirely up to you!

4. Next, if you want to hide posts from the main page, go back to the Dashboard and look for the RYO Plugins button right at the bottom on the left (underneath Settings) and click it!

   

   From here you can see the list of categories along with their numeric IDs, and you can see that I’ve unticked the boxes on the Old-Site category for the Front and Feed options – which will ensure that any posts I put under the category Old-Site don’t appear on my home page or in the RSS Feed!

Conclusion

WordPress can be a little counter-intuitive and inflexible on its own, but because of its fantastic plugin architecture, and due to the great work of so many plugin authors, you have an incredible range of tools and techniques at your disposal to make your site work the way you want it to! So if you want to put posts about Gaming or Music or Films or anything into its own page, you can work around the architecture and get it done with just a couple of clicks. Good stuff

Wow… He really brings out the beauty in that song… (or as some j00t00b comment put it: Wow! I didn’t know that drunk guy from The Hangover could sing! Hehehe).

The VPS company I was hosting this site with suck, and the site’s been up and down sporadically all month… So I’ve migrated it to another VPS! Ha!

Unfortunately, as I had a database backup from yesterday, and a file backup from a few months back there’s a couple of gremlins in the install to do with missing plugins/images/etc, so please bear with me while I iron out the kinks… Cheers!

Update: I’ve vented plasma from the the warp nacelles, inverted the flux-capacitors, and emptied the crumbs out of the toaster tray – so everything should be firing on all cylinders – leave a comment if you find something that’s broken and I’ll look into it! Ta! =D

Ha! Good point, well made.

The only problems being you have to know or find a place to padlock your bike, the weather (it’s winter in the AU atm – and its rained about 20 out of the last 21 days ), and I need to cart a minimum of two bags to school each day… Bah! Excuses, excuses.

Things have been a bit quiet on the r3dux.org front of late, but it’s not been because I’ve been getting my Starcraft on or navel-gazing too much. Instead, I’ve been jumping through all kinds of administrative hoops, filling out forms, having interviews, and trying to get into a Ph.D by Research program – and guess what? It is ON!! =D

So, I’m now officially a Ph.D undergrad – but what the hell does this really mean?

Well, for the work, it means that I’m going to spend at least the next three years working on putting together a kitchen-sink approach to getting user input (as in “everything but the kitchen sink”) – so we’re looking at arm/hand/finger movement and gesture recognition, voice recognition, head tracking, eye tracking, all with (at first) just a monitor/webcam/gloves, but hopefully moving on to 3D data-glasses as things get closer to completion.

For me personally, it means that I’m going to be busy. Really busy. For the next 3 years. And that for the second and third year I’m only going to be able to work one day a week teaching, as I’m going to be expected to put in a minimum of 32 hours per week researching, performing literature review, writing code, and getting my 3D on. Really, I’m trying to do the first year part-time (so I can still work, and ya know, pay my rent, eat etc.), but get it done within a full-time schedule, so it’s all going to be a bit hectic.

I’ve got to say I’m really looking forward to it all though… I mean, come on! Three year research project trying to push past the bleeding-edge (or at least incorporate the bleeding-edge) into something that’s never been done before? That’s exciting and terrifying stuff! =D It’s going to be an incredible amount of work, but I think it’ll be worth it, and it’s something I can check off my life-list so when it comes the time to weigh up what you’ve done with your life, I’ll feel (rightly or wrongly) that I’ve made some kind of contribution to society and to humanity, and that’ll be good enough for me.

But these are early days yet, there are papers to be read, APIs & middleware to research, and heavy-duty textbooks to fight through (such as the delightfully titled: Interactive Elastic Two-Layer Soft Body Simulation with OpenGL: Design and Development of an OpenGL-based Framework for Dynamic Deformation of Uniform Elastic Two-Layer Objects – no, really – it’s on my reading list!).

So wish me well – I’ve got a feeling I’m going to need it!