Debwire,
I can certainly appreciate your frustrations. From the documentation point of view, you outline a lot of things that we wish to target to help people who want to more easily understand and work with WordPress.
The developers will have to answer some of your other questions and address some of your comments.
Craig.
There’s a number of directions to go. The easiest three are:
– make different pages be different categories, with information in separate posts.
– make different pages using index.php as your basis, with explicit links to the other pages. This is the easiest if you want to maintain the look and feel…
– make separate ‘static’ pages for the one-shot stuff. if you significantly modify the look and feel, you might need to tweak these. then again, if you share the CSS file, and use good semantic markup matching WPs, you’re bound to remain 99% in line.
There’s actually one other option, which is to make categories that you predefine as ‘single post’ categories. i.e., “About”. Then you modify index.php so that when it is showing one of your single-post categories, the visual/content output is tweaked (something like how on my site — http://www.chait.net — when you go into an article, the CSS/layout is slightly modified from the normal blog listing formatting. You also then modify the index.php to NOT show in normal query/sorts those single post categories (lots of discussions about ‘hiding’ categories from the main listing around here).
I can give you help/advice on making it so that you get single-post CSS that looks different from lists of posts — that’s easy. But as for which direction to try and achieve the single-post thing… that you have to sorta feel out and decide for yourself.
=d
Maybe we can sweet-talk David into writing a tutorial for just this kind of thing? 🙂
Craig.
http://wdt.silent-aurora.net/php03.php
is a lot like the script I’m using for my template site, which when it’s finished (sometimes this week) will also have a guide to creating your own template for WordPress.
I implemented an “About this Site” page a few days ago in WP1. Using the admin tools, I created a new link category (“My Stuff” in this case). I went into index.php and added the link category to display (my blog currently displays separate “boxes” for each of the link categories).
I then “hollowed out” a copy of the Index.php page to remove the blog headline and content, and added some static text in the page itself. I then saved in as “about.php”. Added the link to “about.php” to the Link Category I previously created (“My Stuff”), and everything works nicely.
It’s a somewhat klugy solution to use the links category/ies as internal navigation, but the end result seems to be working fine for me.
My solution for implementaing a separate photoblog will likely build on the above, and involve a separate WP install (same database). I’ll carry over look-and-feel and use the “My Stuff” section to hope between the blogs and pages as needed. At least, that my idea this morning… 😉
There is a very good tutorial for skinning websites over at http://www.domesticat.net/skins/howto.php
I’m sure it’ll work for wp if it’s altered a little.
Maybe somebody could go, ask wether we might webnap the tuto and modify it…
Christian
Okidoki everyone… I guess I’ve made a decision as to how I’m going to handle this situation and maybe it will be helpful to others in the same situation if I share it… I’ve decided to go with two installations of WP: one for my regular blog and one for my photoblog. This decision was based on the future enhancements in WP and the fact that I’m tired of using multiple apps to accomplish various things. Also, while the hacks can be tedious to maintain at this point, upgrading WP in general is easy–so I’m not really intimidated by the fact that I will have to maintain two installations and keep them current. Creating the second installation was a snap. While I tried to make my initial installation the “be all” of everything I wanted for my blog, I realized that separating my interest in photography from my regular blog was the only way to go, especially from a design point of view. I was trying to do too much with one blog. Now I have one for my general rantings on life and subjects that interest me and another where its only focus is one subject. This decision was hurdle # 1.
Now that I’ve made this decision, I need to know whether or not it is possible for two installations of WP to use the same CSS file? I wish to maintain some of the same look and feel across both, but the layouts within index.php will be somewhat different at some point…
debwire,
You can use the same CSS file for any number of installs. All you have to do is point at the one you want using the @import function you find near the top of your index.php file. You only need to ensure you are specifying the correct path to the CSS file.
