WordPress 1.2 to 1.5 migration
Upgrading WP works like a charm following the WordPress wiki’s instructions… For testing, I duplicated an existing installation, to see what it was like…:
copied the database- uploaded the unpacked install files
- changed the db settings in /wp-config.php to the copied database
- ran / wp-admin/upgrade.php
- in the database, manually adjusted in the wp_options table:
- siteurl to the new testurl
- home to that same new testurl
… and I got a copy of the blog up and running.
Two nice results that struck me:
- the 13 tables were being reduced to only 9
- in /wp-content/themes/ there was a subdir with the newley created theme “european-democracy”, next to the “default” (Kubrick) and “classic” theme
This means I could now safely test and edit the files in the “european-democracy” theme (a copy of the default theme) via the “Presentations -> “Theme Editor” menu, or by downloading the files in Dreamweaver . The former installation of WordPress was a heavy hack, I wanted to do it “the clean way” now adapting the theme to the original look and feel step by step (filenames refer to files in the theme subdir: /wp-content/themes/european-democracy/). After going through the modifications described here, I was so pleased I applied most of them to this blog as well ;-) .
CSS and images
- most of the css information is in style.css , but the image css is contained in header.php (the reason for that being that the background picture depends on the presence of a sidebar or not -> hence some code is involved to check this)
- for my purpose, I could simply remove the css lines from header.php, because I wanted a permanent sidebar, and I didn’t need a background picture for page and footer
- the only image I needed were the header and page background, so I added to style.css :
#header { background: url("images/european-democracy_header.jpg"); }
#page { background: url("images/european-democray_page_background.gif"); }
(note the relative url relative to the css file) - the blog’s logo and description are inclosed in the headerimg tag, but since the picture already mentions the title, I commented out title and description:
#headerimg
{
display: none;
}
- Unfortunately, this makes there’s no link any more to the homepage in the header… My remedy: inserting a transparent image
in header.php , I added this div:
<!-- modif pvh -->
<div id="header_click_home"><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home');
?>" title = "<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>"><img src="<?php
bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/images/1px_transparent.gif" alt ="<?php
bloginfo('description'); ?>" border="0" width ="780"
height="145" /></a></div><!-- end modif pvh -->
into the header div, but before the headerimg div
CSS and width
- to change page width: replaced the nr of pixels for the #page element in style.css, I made it identical to the width of the header background img
- I omitted the width for the footer element, it didn’t seem necessary
- the left column is on the home page determined by the class “narrowcolumn” and the text on the right is in the div sidebar, so I played a bit with widths:
.narrowcolumn {
float: left;
padding: 0 0 20px 15px;
margin: 0px 0 0;
width: 580px;
}
#sidebar {
padding: 10px 0px 10px 0px;
margin-left: 625px;
width: 150px;
}
I still don’t understand how IE deals with this… I you simply change the padding for #sidebar to “padding: 10px 0px 10px 5px;” the sidebar moves to the bottom, where as I thought padding shouldn’t influence the position of an element?!
CSS and colors
- changed background color to #fff (white in a few places)
- adjusted stylesheet link colors and indicated changes with /* modif pvh */
Adding the sidebar to single archive page
- in the stylesheet, I made .widecolumn identical to .narrowcolumn:
.widecolumn {
float: left;
padding: 0 0 20px 15px;
margin: 0px 0 0;
width: 580px;
}
- in single.php, replaced “<?php get_sidebar(); ?>” with:
<!--modif pvh -->
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<!-- end modif pvh -->
<?php get_footer(); ?>
Metadata font size
- in order to make the metadata smaller:
.narrowcolumn .postmetadata {
padding-top: 0px;
font-size: .75em;
}
Note that I added the fontsize to this combined identifier, not to .postmetadata in order not to change the font size of the metadata under a single post!
Truncated archives and search results
- I don’t like the way the default theme truncates the entries in the archives (with an auto-excerpt to a max of characters), I would rather retain the division between summary and full text the author already put in by using the <!–more–> tag
- Easy enough… in archive.php and search.php, change:
<div class="entry">
<?php
//the_excerpt() //modif pvh
the_content()
?>
</div>
Moving post date
- in order to have the posting date under the posting, I changed a line in archive.php, search.php, index.php:
<p class="postmetadata"><?php the_time('l, F jS, Y') ?>.
Posted in <?php the_category(', ') ?> <strong>|</strong> <?php
edit_post_link('Edit','','<strong>|</strong>'); ?> <?php comments_popup_link('No
Comments »', '1 Comment »', '% Comments »'); ?></p> - no need to change code to remove the date indication under the title, this could be done by selectively making the <small> tag invisible when preceded by the H2 and H3 title tag:
/* start modif pvh */
h2 + small, h3 + small
{
display: none;
}
/* end modif pvh */
Update: hmm, as this Dutch manual indicates, IE doesn’t support “Adjacent sibling element-selector”!
Sidebar
- removed the metalinks in the sidebar by removing these lines from sidebar.php:
<li><h2><?php _e('Meta'); ?></h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_register(); ?>
<li><?php wp_loginout(); ?></li>
<li><a href="http://validator.w3.org/check/referer" title="<?php
_e('This page validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional'); ?>"><?php _e('Valid
<abbr title="eXtensible HyperText Markup Language">XHTML</abbr>');
?></a></li>
<li><a href="http://gmpg.org/xfn/"><abbr title="XHTML
Friends Network">XFN</abbr></a></li>
<li><a href="http://wordpress.org/" title="<?php _e('Powered
by WordPress, state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform.'); ?>">WordPress</a></li>
<?php wp_meta(); ?>
</ul> - made sure the links were displayed on the archives pages by changing
<?php /* If this is the frontpage */ if ( is_home() || is_page() /*start modif
pvh */ || true /*end modif pvh */) { ?>
in sidebar.php
Javascript to make external links open in new window
- really a great idea from Marko Dugonjic, so I adapted the header.php
Strange effects
- I had a some point replaced the #footer entries by:
#footer {
display: none;
clear: both;
}
but the funny result was that in firefox, the border around the page, only came as far down as the right menu text… another weird effect of floating div’s…
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