Using the “OLD” version of TMA? The version before WooThemes took it over? Still having problems? Well, quit using that antique edition and download the latest version of “The Morning After” from WooThemes and get busy!

I had tried to put the “beat down” on TMA back when I’d first started blogging… it was a rather disappointing endeavor… my PHP and WordPress skills were simply not up to the task. But, I’d blogged about the experience never-the-less. Mr. Spencer, the master behind the men’s fashion website at i.con{blog}, pinged me a few weeks back… asking all sorts of questions regarding “The Morning After” WordPress theme and my experiences. What began as a simple query, turned into a slew of emails on Categories, Tags, SEO, PHP, and The Morning After theme modifications.

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Gridlock Theme

Well, knock me down with a feather. I haven’t looked at hyalineskies Gridlock Theme since I began using WordPress back in 2004. Hailed by many as one of the first ‘magazine style’ themes, I cut many a tooth during those months attempting to force Gridlock to bend to my bidding. It was work. Gridlock was a pretty locked-down theme as far as WordPress Themes are concerned. But, things have chanced since the days of WordPress 2.x and I was curious how Gridlock had grown. Hyalineskies is not longer available, as Eston Bond has moved on to other things. But a decent run-down of its functionality is still up on his site and is still being managed at Github.

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Site5 put together a pretty sweet theme when they created Boldy. I’d been considering it for this blog for over a week and decided to give it a try. Alas, in the end, I ditched the idea. But, only because I couldn’t quite massage it to meet my needs. However, for someone putting together a portfolio, this theme should be near the top of your short-list.

While working with the theme, I ran across a quite a few confusing problems that I would like to address / fix here.

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*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 BEFORE 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?

If there is one thing I distaste about most blogs, is the rambling front page with endless entries. I like my websites to be concise, organized but interesting to the eye. That’s one of the biggest reasons I am using the Gridlock theme. It has that… magazine style of front end that appeals to me. So, when my previous ‘Art of Wasting Time’ entry, I was rather upset with myself for letting it get it get so long.

So, I have decided to continue along the the ‘Best of Online Video’ theme, and continue with what I consider to be some of the greatest clips I have found.

It took me some time to think back to previous clips that I had noticed and laughed considerably afterwards (or during, if it was particularly amusing). I have to give my ‘props’ to SNL… you’ll see why.

You know… I haven’t seen ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’. I have, however, read the book. I like most Sci-Fi moral tales…. except Harry Potter. I guess it’s just me. I’m more of a ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy‘ kind of guy.

Last summer, my two kids (Jared and Haley) and myself worked on a digital-short which they had written themselves. It was a pretty novel idea. It was spawned from the ‘Intro to Film and Video’ class that I took over a year ago here at the University of Iowa.

Yes. It’s a shameless plug. But, hey, it’s my kids. They are pretty stinkin’ smart… obviously they get it from me…. maybe.

Some of the funniest clips are those that should never have been leaked out to the general public. If you know what I mean, then you’ve seen the ‘Star Wars Kid’ clips. If not… where have you BEEN!

Begin Short Break-Down: Some kid at school used their equipment to film himself doing light-saber stunts using some kind of long pole as his weapon. Someone else grabbed the footage and posted it online. It spurned a whole series of clips that placed him in odd situations, usually super-imposing him atop of ‘Neo’ of the Matrix or Uma Thurman in ‘Kill Bill’. This is my favorite clip… the Star Wars version. For more info on the whole story, read about it here. Here is more on from Wired.com.

For those that simply cannot figure out EXACTLY how to add new pages they’ve created for their blog into the header. I may have more detailed instructions:

You’ll have to manually edit the the header.php file in the Theme Editor. Toward the bottom of the file, you’ll find where the page listings are stored. Just locate the the comment that says:

— change these links to suit your site –

You should find the div class=’nav’ tag that adds the ‘home’ link just below that. Just copy & paste another version of that line for each ‘page’ button you want to add. Edit it the copied line like this:

<div class=”nav”><a href=”<?php bloginfo(’url’); ?>/name-of-page” title=”name-of-page”>name-of-page-to-display-in-nav-bar</a></div>

I hope this helps.