Shiny

Massive changes to dBaines.com
I’ve wanted to incorporate some new features of  Wordpress 2.7 and 2.8, and while I was at it I figured I might as well revamp the entire website.

1. New URL Structure
   I’ve moved WordPress to the root directory of dbaines.com now and have enabled pretty permalinks.
   This was a real pain to get going because for some reason, no matter what permissions I gave the .htaccess file, WordPress just wouldn’t write to it. So after a lot of trial and error I eventually got it working by manually entering in the WordPress permalink code. It still isn’t writing to it, so every time I make changes to the permalink structure I need to update it
   I shouldn’t need to update it any more anyway since I think I’ve got it just how I want it.Due to moving the blog to the root directory I can now utilise WordPress’ built-in homepage setting, rather than the hacky htaccess-based one I had before (redirecting all over the place.)

   Pages are now dbaines.com/page-name
   Posts are now dbaines.com/blog/archive/post-name
   Unfortunately, the search points to the homepage, rather than the blog page now, so I’ll have to look in to that.

   I’ve scripted up 301 redirects for all the pages. Blog posts automatically redirect.
   Hopefully there shouldn’t be any 404s for old searches/bookmarks.

2. New Design, Broken Designs
   Based on my recent homepage design, now a consistent look and feel for the entire website.
   It’s based on the WordPress 2.8 default template, so it’s a complete re-write, so things are still missing and/or looking weird.

   I also created these shiny new buttons. I don’t know what I’d use them for though, but it was a fun experiment with WordPress’ new “shortcodes” (basically their version of BBCode)

    

   Download Source File? Generic File Download Download Archive (ZIP) (4.3mb)

    

   Aren’t they shiny?I’ll probably release them in the download section once I transparent PNG them up. At the moment they are just gifs with a very specific grey in the background.

   Unfortunately, while all the other custom themes should theoretically work with the new codebase, the template switcher plugin for WordPress doesn’t
   Hopefully it gets updated soon so the other themes will work again.

3. Contextual Sidebars
   I started doing this with my last revamp with different sidebars for the blog and art gallery sections.
   I now have a different sidebar for the about page as well.
   I’ve put in code for custom sidebars for each page, I just need to consider what to put in them
   For now everywhere else defaults back to the blog sidebar.
   For some pages I might even hide the sidebar and make the page content span the entire width.
4. Art Gallery
   The Art Gallery is currently really ugly since I haven’t written up a matching template, but I figured it would be best to make sure the gallery was functional even if it looked terrible, so I’ve left it as it is. A matching template should be up within the next few days.
   I’m actually considering updating ZenPhoto to the latest version as well and rewriting a completely new template from the ground up utilising all of it’s new features too