internetpilot

Sorry guys, I cannot use FireFox due a couple of other apps I’m using requiring IE. I don’t think it’s an IE problem because I’m not having a problem with seeing or displaying it — just editing it. I hope you guys weren’t able to test that function or there’s a serious security problem on my blog! (haha?)

— Chris

Tried it — doesn’t work or it just ends up convoluting the problems further. FrontPage doesn’t seem to handle anything out of the index.php file very well, including moving every line that says “Don’t remove this” to the body of the file. Font tags or any other type of GUI based formatting that I’m used to using do not seem to have any affect on the output at all. It’s just a mess.
For WordPress it appears that I’m actually better off using CSS because the way that is most comfortable for me doesn’t work at all — at least I’m getting something when I use CSS. Still, I haven’t seen much use for CSS other than adding a layer of confusion to web page design, which is a rather simple thing in itself, especially for something as text based as a blog.

Thanks, everyone, for your help. I really do appreciate it and want you to know that I’m not just a whining newbie who wants everything to work exactly the way that I want it to instantly. Okay, actually I do want it that way instantly (doesn’t everyone?), but now realize that most Perl scripts and and most PHP scripts do not handle templates, styles, and even CSS the same way. Well, maybe CSS, but configuring the actual layout appears to be quite different from what I’m used to. I’m also admittedly confused a bit on what’s PHP, what’s just relatively simply HTML, and what’s CSS (and which to go to for what I want to do), but just the suggestions in this thread have helped out immensely. I will keep at it. This is too good of a script to move on to a different one. Obviously, the community support for this script is also here and very active.
I’ll start with a canned style that’s similar to what I want as a final product, and work from there. Sigh…not another “learning experience”…. 🙂 I’m getting too old for “learning experiences”.

Posting the URL would be no use to anyone — it’s a new domain, new site, and now just has a default reinstall of WordPress there.
I think my issues are far more basic and preliminary. I really want to either display the Blog description under the Blog name or just insert a graphic that has the blog name and description, but there is no style that I can find that has this. I learned Perl purely by example, looking at other people’s stuff and modifying it to suit my own needs, site theme, etc. I just can’t figure out the format of the index.php, and where to put specific template tags, etc., and cannot seem to find something like I want that I can use as a learning tool. It just doesn’t seem very intuitive to me at this point, whereas things moved along a LOT more quickly for me when learning Perl.
To further an analogy used above, if I was able to put a bigger engine in my Ford last year after owning it for only a week, shouldn’t I expect to have enough knowledge to put a bigger engine in my new Chevy that I’ve now owned for a week? In the end, they’re both cars and combustion engines…why should it be so different. I guess I didn’t expect Perl and PHP to be so different, but I guess it’s a confirmation of sanity that it works both ways — there are people who can’t figure out Perl after using PHP.
I think part of the problem is that this is definitely not a script for a PHP newbie — especially not one who doesn’t want to use the default look of this script. I’m okay with that. Nothing annoys me more than someone without the knowledge trying to do something they shouldn’t be doing. I think I’m probably fitting that bill myself right about now.
I’ll hang out, do some more looking around, learning, stumbling, messing things up, etc. , and see what comes of it all in the end. I’m installing this to a brand new site, and the blog will be the primary function of this new site, so it’s not like I’ll be messing up other stuff by dinking around with WordPress.I’ll post questions along the way (with URLs by that point)…
Thanks again!

Sorry, Root — I sincerely didn’t mean to be so vague.
I guess my problem is definitely a style/template thing. I really want to customize WordPress to look like the rest of my website, but that is proving to be FAR more difficult of a thing than any of the Perl scripts I’m using. I have received several confirmations of sanity out on the web by seeing other people not wanting to use WordPress because “it’s so difficult to template”, but I’ve been looking for a while and WordPress definitely seems to be the best thing going in Blogs. Like I said above, Perl scripts that I’ve used allow you to edit colors and even some formatting via menu driven scripts, checkboxes for displaying certain fields (or not), etc. I don’t want to sound like a big baby though, because with Perl scripts I typically use whatever configuration function they have and then just dive right into the actual code for any modifications or customizations that I can’t do via their more automated configuration options. I am just not able to do that with PHP. Perl seems to be a far more “obvious” scripting language, whereas PHP seems a bit more cryptic.
I guess a specific example of my frustration is that I’ve be going in circles for hours just trying to get my Blog’s description inserted under the Blog name. Then I finally get it there, but it’s not really under, it’s next to it and wrapped, and the same size font as the name or title. The header entries for some of the templates I’m trying to tweak/modify seem to be in numerical order (I’m probably not explaining this correctly due to very little knowledge of PHP), like the name is H1, the date is H2, etc. With that being the case, where do I insert the description? It just seems like (to me) that this type of basic display option should be a menu driven checkbox setting or something rather than something I have to manually insert into a template. I mean, why did it ask me for a Blog description when I first installed the script if the default template wasn’t even going to show the description? See what I mean?
I realize this is probably a very basic problem, but if I cannot even get beyond figuring out this, I’ll never be able to get further into customization. I just felt like I was missing something basic and obvious, but I guess what I’m missing is the knowledge of PHP.