Thursday, 31 January 2008

 

Developments and Widgitization



No, I have not been procrastinating about any of my personal design projects as mentioned earlier. Okay, I have a little bit. Anyway, the point is, I have been doing things.

You probably wouldn't have noticed this yet, but the copy on TerraMedia, particularly on the Home and Learn More pages has been updated. As the description meta tag is also what shows up in Google when TerraMedia comes up, this has also been updated to better reflect the primary target.

The new copy and tags don't yet show up in Google as it has not yet been crawled again, but this will hopefully be there in the next week or so.

Now, that's not that much is it?

No, but I have been doing other things too.

I was working on the new template for Still As Life, then it was looking awesome and was almost finished when a thought popped into my head. "Hey, I think I might change this blog over to WordPress rather than keep it on Blogger."

So I have spent most of the past couple of hours converting the template to a widgetized theme for WordPress. Despite having made widgetized themes before, as well as worked on ones that have already been widgetized, I always seem to forget something. A very useful thing to have on hand if you plan on widgetizing a WordPress theme is the article on Automattic about it. Very easy to follow and makes lots of sense. However, the section where it explains how to add multiple widgetized menus is a little confusing. So for the unsuspecting widgetizer, it may not work as simply as it would first appear it should. For that reason, here is what it should look like if you have 2 widgetized menus:
<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(2,array(
'before_widget' => '',
'after_widget' => '',
'before_title' => '<div class="title">',
'after_title' => '</div>',
));
?>
Note that when it is mentioned on Automattic:
"I have a theme with more than one sidebar. How do I make them all dynamic?

Oh, that’s easy. Instead of register_sidebar() you should use register_sidebars(n) where n is the number of sidebars. Then place the appropriate number in the dynamic_sidebar() function, starting with 1."
It is referring to the second register_sidebar, not the first.

Anyway, hope that helps someone. There is also a possibility I won't use WordPress, but I'm having fun with my beautiful code all the same.

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