WordPress Zen: The Morning After Theme

Posted February 26th, 2010 in Programming, WordPress by Dennis

*NOTE* (11/30/10) The Morning After Theme has officially moved to Woo Themes. Not only have they updated the theme, but added additional functionality. What is detailed below, is the latest version of the theme The Morning After WordPress Theme: by WooThemesBEFORE it was moved to Woo Themes. If you’re looking for additional help with the WooThemes version, then check it out here.

After my son, Jared, was set up with his own website, we began talking about what his goals for his new URL. We started writing manual HTML and basic CSS in an effort to understand the basics of creating one’s own website. We followed that with the benefits of WordPress (or ANY Content Management System for that matter) and what it really meant to separate content from the design.

I gave Jared a list of WordPress themes to give him a idea of what was available. Less than a day later, he had decided upon Arun Kale’s “The Morning After” theme based out of themasterplan.in.

I had looked at “The Morning After” theme when I started this website some years ago, but back then I didn’t have enough PHP or WordPress experience to make a go of it. It is a fantastic-looking theme, but development has ground to a halt, the support documentation isn’t complete and spammers have taken over its forum.

It’s not a WordPress theme for the weak.

So, below I have compiled a list of issues with “The Morning After” theme. Dust off your search engine and let’s get dirty.

Plugins

Don’t use the plugins that come with TMA. They are all out-of-date. These include: Lester Chan‘s WP-Print and WP-Email plugins, and the Post-Thumb Revisited plugin by Alakhnor. After installing the latest plugins, I noticed that WordPress kept complaining about a new version of Post-Thumb Revisited. No matter what I tried, WordPress would not install the latest version. This is because the version number of its library is not identical to the main plugin. I solved that by using the WordPress editor to change the version number in both the library AND the Post-Thumb widget… as of this writing the version was 2.2.1.b.

It worked, so I’m not going to complain…for now. :)

Oh, BTW! If you use the latest Post-Thumb Revisited plugin, you also get the benefit of allowing the plugin to work FOR you, instead of having to enter those pesky Custom Fields into each post.

Header Navigation

The next item to tackle after installing “The Morning After” will be to fix the header navigation to suite your website. You will want to create three new pages: About, Archives and Contact. The About and Contact pages use the default page.php file, while you’ll want to apply the archive.php template to the Archives page. Edit the header.php file and replace the “menu” un-ordered list with the following code.

<ul id="menu">
<li><span class="home"><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>">Home</a></span></li>
<li><span class="about"><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/About">About</a></span></li>
<li><span class="archives"><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/Archives">Archives</a></span></li>
<li><span class="subscribe"><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/feed">Subscribe</a></span></li>
<li><span class="contact"><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/Contact">Contact</a></span></li>
</ul>

There, now THAT’S fixed.

Sidebar Issues

You’ll notice that “The Morning After” theme hard-code’s a category widget into the right sidebar. I modified the wp_list_categories API to remove the post counts and sub-classes. What I did looks like this:

<?php wp_list_categories('title_li=&sort_column=name&show_count=0&depth=1&show_last_updated=1&use_desc_for_title=1&exclude=' .$catid. ',' .$catid2. '') ?>

Removing Those Ads

I’m not one to market or “profit-ize” my website. Maybe. Someday…but, not now.

Those ads are not where one would think, the Sidebar. Well…you’re half right. They are also in the home.php page. You’ll see the Ad. One could delete (entirely) the ad_home.php and ad_side.php pages, but I’m not confident that’ll fix anything. I prefer to remove the source. You’ll find a reference to ad_home.php in the home.php page and here’s what I did to that:

<?php /* include('ad_home.php'); */ ?>

When you locate the reference to the ad_side.php page in the Sidebar, add the necessary comment code and everything should be fixed.

I’m sure there are other issues, but for the most part; the HTML is clean and I didn’t have to do anything with the CSS. There may be more, but leave a comment and perhaps I can figure-out you problem. Any takers?

Skype API and Chat Bots

Posted January 1st, 2010 in Programming, Technology by Dennis

Skype

Over the last few weeks, I have been working on a chat-bot that acts much more than a simple echo server. With the plethora of Instant Message clients on the market (Yahoo, AIM, GTalk, Pidgin, Adium, etc.), it was difficult to determine which IM client suited my needs. First, the client needed to be available across several platforms (Windows, Windows Mobile 6, Linux, OS X). Second, their needed be an existing publicly available API in order to write the chat-bot code. Third, it was imperative that the API was actively being deployed and developed. Why mess around with an IM client that nobody was using?

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Remote Desktop, JollysFastVNC, Mac and Ubuntu 9.04

Posted October 24th, 2009 in Programming, Technology by Dennis
Ubuntu

Ubuntu

Whoa…that’s a mouthful.

I’ve been working on my own local Ubuntu 9.04 web server for over a week and finally got all the pieces put together (Apache2, MySQL and PHP). But, what I REALLY wanted was a way to tunnel into my Ubuntu web server and administer it from my old Mac G4 Powerbook.

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Alien vs. Predator vs. Riff Raff Theater

Posted May 4th, 2009 in Comedy, Local, News, Programming by Dennis

avp-poster-smallCritically panned by EVERY movie critic in the Western Spiral Arm of the Milkyway Galaxy, Riff Raff Theater skewers the movie that caused James Cameron to halt co-development with Ridley Scott on a 5th Alien movie…you guessed it: Alien vs. Predator!

The ONLY decent aspect of this movie is the continuity revolving around Lance Henriksen (you know…the cyborg in “Aliens”). Even if they could have convinced Sigourney Weaver and Bill Paxton to commit to this disastrous concept, they couldn’t save this horrible flick. Which begs the question: Why did it become one of the more successful films in the franchise? God only knows…and he ain’t tellin’.

Watch the mayhem and hilarity ensue this Friday, May 8th at the Englert in Iowa City at 8:00PM.

You know that I’ll be there. What are YOU doing this Friday? I thought so.

Giving Your Blog that “Root” Feeling

Posted April 28th, 2009 in Programming, WordPress by Dennis

wordpressThis has been asked several times:

“How do I get my WordPress blog to LOOK like it’s in the root directory…when it actually is not.”

What has happened, is that you’ve grown tired of how long your URL is, like “http://www.my-blog.com/wordpress/my-awesome-post/”. You want to get rid of that “wordpress” part.

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Changing the WordPress 2.7 Blogroll Title

Posted April 23rd, 2009 in Programming, WordPress by Dennis

wordpressBack in the day (pre-Wordpress 2.5…I think) much of the sidebar additions were not “widgetized”. Meaning; much of the sidebar(s) had been “hard-coded”. For those knowledgeable with PHP could edit their Theme’s sidebar.php file and manipulate their own Blogroll text to read as something else.

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Ubuntu Server and freeRADIUS 2.0.5

Posted August 20th, 2008 in Programming, Technology by Dennis

For the last week, I have been attempting to install a RADIUS daemon on my Ubuntu Server. Alas, the RADIUS server I had originally installed, did not agree the the version of PERL that Ubuntu had been compiled with. Ain’t it always like that…sigh.

The only option was to compile the latest stable version of freeRADIUS 2.0.5 on Ubuntu and cross my fingers. It was NOT all that easy. Before you compile freeRADIUS, there are two changes you’ll have to make before freeRADIUS plays nice with Debian. After you have downloaded freeRADIUS from freeradius.org (as a non-root user), do the following:
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