still struggling to find a way to properly represent a complex hierarchical taxonomy along with paired year data in Drupal, to do something like allowing a contributor to specify that someone received a UBC: Bachelor’s Degree: Bachelor’s of Science: Zoology in 1998 – in such a way that I could use the UBC, Bachelor’s, BSc, and Zoology levels of the hierarchy, as well as the year. It’s not just a simple Taxonomy vocabulary because the year pairing throws it off… It’s not just a simple CCK field, because it needs to be more flexible…
Monthly Archives: April 2008
watch your step
AsideShop should be able to provide some almost-Drupal functionality in WordPress. Without the content types stored in the database, and just at the presentation layer, but still this could be very cool for building websites where you want to display different bits of content in different ways. Could have different templates for podcasts, videos, presentations, blog entries, etc… Interesting…
but, can asides be posted without having to enter anything the Title field? asides aren’t big enough to need titles… Update: YES! No title necessary! It’ll use the post ID in the slug, and looks like it works just fine. Rock.
Tumblog in WordPress – my own personal Twitter?
I’ve been playing around with the idea of publishing all of my content in one place – what would that look like? What would be lost, with respect to the social network effects that exist in other hosted services? It seems strange to be posting blog entries here, short updates to Twitter, photos to Flickr, etc… I’ve been wondering what it would look like if I just posted everything here, and then looked at ways to get it out, to rebuild the social network in a distributed, decentralized way.
One thing I’ve been struggling with is how absolutely trivial this would be if I was still running Drupal. Define some content types, slap in some templates for them, and decide which nodes get promoted to front page. Done. But WordPress doesn’t work like that. There’s not a clean and easy way to define something like a “Twitter Update” content type, or a “Photo” content type.
Well, actually, there is a clean and easy way. But it involves adding a couple of plugins. First, I added the AsideShop plugin. It’s pretty cool, and lets you define what are essentially templates for each of the categories on a WordPress site – superficially emulating the different node templates you can create in Drupal. I created an “aside” category, and told AsideShop to display it differently than the default posts. But… If I was to keep posting Twitter-like updates, my RSS feed would be pretty polluted with garbage that 99% (or more) of the remaining subscribers just wouldn’t care about.
Here is a screenshot of what asides look like currently:
The AsideShop configuration looks like this:
So, I added the Advanced Category Excluder plugin, and told it to remove everything in the “aside” category from the main site feed. Easy peasy.
All I have to do is write a regular post, and select the “aside” category. Everything else is handled automagically. I can expose all of the asides on their own page, and through their own feed. Wonder what I’ll wind up doing with that…
interesting ride
I was missing riding my bike – having parked it for 2 days following the second freak spring blizzard of 2008 – so decided to ride this morning anyway. Fun, in parts. Not so much, in others. Slush froze into clumps of sharp, crunchy ice, making some of the road sections difficult. The paths were all fine, but some of the side streets were downright scary. Not sure if I’ll be riding tomorrow or not…
zhivago was here
choke
yeah. the flames choked. again. defense was stuck in third gear. offense was shaky. we got outplayed. again. “blue collar work ethic” only goes so far – you have to show up, too.
AsideShop
I’m playing with a WordPress plugin called AsideShop – it lets you define a category to be handled as “asides” and provides a way to override the post display template so you can make them look however you want. The cool thing is – you can define post templates for each category on your site, if that kind of thing floats your boat. Very cool. But, I do need to figure out how to exclude items in the Asides category from the main site feed…