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 They are all out-of-date.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?

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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WordPress, WAP and mobile phones

Posted July 12th, 2008 in Programming, SiteNews, Technology, WordPress by Dennis

wordpress-grey-m.png A couple of weeks ago, I became frustrated with Motorola RAZR and decided to upgrade my cellphone to the new Motorola RAZR2. I loved my RAZR, but it was past its warranty and its main screen was constantly blank. When I upgraded through Verizon, I decided to try out Verizon’s Mobile Web package. To my surprise, many of the websites I visited were not optimized to be viewed through a WAP enabled phone. This meant that the websites didn’t display properly and navigating them through my cellphone was an absolute pain.

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podPress, iTunes and the FeedID

Posted July 7th, 2008 in News, SiteNews, WordPress by Dennis

For those of you struggling with podPress, wait to further. Well, you’ll have to way anyway, but here’s some things you should know:

FeedID: You’ll have to wait. It takes time for Apple and iTunes to check out your podcast. For me, I had to wait 3 days before I received a reply from iTunes regarding my feedID. Of course, that doesn’t mean podcast can be found on iTunes.

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podcasting with podPress

Posted July 3rd, 2008 in News, SiteNews, WordPress by Dennis

On another website I manage, we have been toying around with the idea of podcasting a few of the audio and video tracks we have accumulated over the years. The only problem is this: How in the heck does one ‘podcast‘?

Now, some of my friends have done it with much success (of course, because I’ve downloaded them all to my iPod). So, the task was to determine the best way to use WordPress with some sort of PodCasting plugin that would give us exactly what we needed. With as much programming experience I have, I never felt that I would not be able to determine the best solution.

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The Art of Wasting Time II (The Best of Online Video)

Posted August 21st, 2007 in Personal, video by Dennis

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.

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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.

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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.

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