Jeremy’s World

Having setup my website in WordPress 2.5 and added a collection of plugins to the mix, I discovered to my dismay that on writing a new blog post, the categories choice section, located just under the WYSIWYG post box was completely fuzzled up.

Essentially what was happening was the choices for “All Categories” and “Most Used” where getting muddled up with the tickboxes and category names, rendering the display virutally useless.  It appeared to be a CSS issue but I could find no evidence of CSS changes after copying fresh the CSS code from the original install files.

Frustrated with the display, I decided to start digging around in the code to find the location for where this section was display.  After about 5 minutes of poking around, I located the categories choice section for Write Post under wp-admin/edit-form-advanced.php.

Under this section I found the following:


<ul id="category-tabs">
<li class="ui-tabs-selected"><a href="#categories-all" tabindex="3"><?php _e( 'All Categories' ); ?></a></li>
<li class="wp-no-js-hidden"><a href="#categories-pop" tabindex="3"><?php _e( 'Most Used' ); ?></a></li>
</ul>


This seemed rather odd since the section below contained div tags.  So I replaced the ul tags with div tags and placed a nested set of ul tags to conform to the structure of the html like so:


<div id="category-tabs">
<ul>
<li class="ui-tabs-selected"><a href="#categories-all" tabindex="3"><?php _e( 'All Categories' ); ?></a></li>
<li class="wp-no-js-hidden"><a href="#categories-pop" tabindex="3"><?php _e( 'Most Used' ); ?></a></li>
</ul>
</div>


This seemed to do the trick.  The display of the categories section suddenly looked usable again.

I must admit straight off the bat - I am not one to cling wholeheartedly to the concept of blogging.  I’m not quite sure exactly why.  I have tried it about four times with little or no success and surprise, surprise; here I am again.

However, this time I am using WordPress for an entirely different reason:  as a Content Management System.

WordPress has come a long long way since its early days.  I can remember back to the pre-AJAX world where everything was not quite so fancy dancy as it is now (not that I am complaining about AJAX and Web 2.0).  I’m just not addicted either to the craze of bandwidth blowout).

However, I have recently been looking around for a CMS for my website which is not overly lourd (to steal a French phrase) but still elegant to use and easy to use and yet… still hackable by the likes of me.

I think I have found the answer: WordPress + about a dozen plugins.

WordPress has always, as far as I can remember, had the ability to create pages as well as blog posts.  However, the lack of structure and usability of the pages system left a lot to be desired in taking WordPress to the next step.  That, thankfully, has changed with WordPress 2.x and the host of clever plugins that have been created by the incredibly large community of bloggers out in the cybersphere.

With WordPress I have been able to establish a basic website structure (even with sub-pages), a photo gallery to host all my travel photos and the beautiful (even if not so ergonomic) back-end makes for a simple and elegant experience which allows me to write content without being totally driven insane.

At the same time the poweful ability to create and customize themes easily has allowed me to tweak an existing theme and set of plugins/widgets to work the way I want - something that isn’t always easily available in an off-the-shelf product.

I would like to take this opportunity to make aware of and thank some of the guys who made the brilliant plugins and themes that I am now making use of - I will put more details about these under the Applications and Multimedia section of the site.  But just to name briefly a few:

Theme:

Daleri Selection by Andreas Viklund

Plugins:

FireStats by Omry Yadan

Lighter Menus by corpodibacco

My Page Order by froman118

NextGEN Gallery by the NextGEN DEV-team

Simple Tags by Alper Haytabay

For the prospective website developer who does not want to invest a lot of time and effort into using a highly-featured cms or develop his or her own, I would highly recommend using WordPress as a time-effective equivalent.