I would like to have some fancy php that could simply look into a specified folder for an image named after the category, and if it couldn’t find an image with that name to use a default. I’ve tried looking on the internet, but since I’m not really sure how to do, I don’t know what to search for. I know this entails three major things: 1)defining the category as a variable (doing something with in_category() or is_page() to create the variable). 2) using that variable to then search for a .jpg by that name, with a fall default if that search fails. 3) Lastly, it should then be pretty easy to display the image that I just asked for.

I write this post hoping, someone reading this may aid my search with some suggestions, or links.

In Defense of Eye Candy – A List Apart

A very good article about why it is important to focus time on the aesthetics of a website, instead of simply worrying about function. It argues well for the reality that function & form a integrally wedded together. One example: what’s wrong with a ! next to a  confirmation dialogue saying “successful”? It sends mixed messages. The brain sees red as bad, green as good. √ as good, X as bad, ! as attention.

Good stuff, check it out.

A Christian Nation? – Brian McLaren

Brian argues that we are not or ever were a Christian nation, using the informal fallacy of “tu quoque“.  You can’t dismiss the United States as not being a Christian nation on the grounds that they have committed and continue to commit injustices. If that could be the case then the people Israel would of lost status way before even Jesus came on the scene. And Paul does a good job in Romans proving that that is not the case.

That being said, I don’t necessarily disagree with you opinion, but with you way of getting there.

8 Ways to be Missional (without overloading your schedule) – CreationProject

Here are some good ways to begin practically living out one’s faith. I have been having a lot of conversations which seem to end with the question of, “so how does this actually happen?” I think the best summation would be to say, get out in the world and live amongst people. Then you are fulfilling what Christ proclaimed as the greatest commandment, love God/love People.

10 Exceptional WordPress Hacks

I haven’t tried any of these yet, but I definitely want to use a few of these. They seem really awesome. I really am excited to see a good explanation of grabbing a post’s image, dynamically re-sizing to thumbnail so you can place into on the frontpage—without having to do any custom-fields or manual insertions. Very clever stuff, a must wp users.

I spent a lot of time this morning reading about grids. The next step on the site should be trying to make everything line up to a baseline grid. Still not exactly sure conceptly how it all works. I mean you have these lines everything is supposed to match against & you use padding/margins to achieve it. But then actually doing that…

I wish I would of grabbed a screen shot of the madness that IE created with FUMCclass.com. The paragraphs were invisible, the headers we sized so big that just a few letters were filling up the whole screen, not to mention problems with the sidebar & footer. It took me about 10 hours total spanning over two days to get most everything lined out. There are still parts that I need to look into.

The trouble with having ubuntu is that I can’t debug in IE. The other day I came to the great idea of using wine. Well trying to do it with wine is very difficult but luckily someone has made it easy; in the form of IEs4Linux. The install is pretty easy, with a gui; though it seemed to be kind of buggie. It hung on the first install, so I had to try again.

IE7 support is still in beta, but from my testing I couldn’t get it to work. It would open though I could never get a page to pull up with it. I didn’t spend much time with it though, so it could of been an error on my part. I was able to get IE6 (and I didn’t try 5.5 or 5) running. Though definitely not stable enough to do anything important, it should be helpful in the future for web development.

Well I realized last night that, if you were viewing a single post it would go back to the default image, even when the category called for something different.

Looking over at codex.wordpress.org’s page on conditional tags showed that you can use is_category and also in_category. I had originally used is, which—after a closer reading—apparently only works when viewing the category itself not the individual posts in the category.

Kind of lame, if you ask me. I’m not really sure the benefit of that. But anyway the in_category seems to recognize both.

So I changed one letter and everything works great.

I took on the project of creation.

And FUMCclass.com was born.

This week has been with many hours working in front of the computer screen working on this site. My associate is also the adult discipleship staff member, so he saw the vision of the site encompassing all of the classes and groups that he oversees.

This created the problem of designing a site that was manageable and expandable. I’m sure not if I have succeeded—though I’m not done I have gotten a lot of the initial setup complete—only time will tell if the levy will break, I guess.

Though my wife thinks I’m a genius with this stuff, it has been hard work trying to get everything worked out. I used wordpress as the foundation, mostly because I was already fairly familiar with it. As with all new venures, I have been able to try some new things out with the site design.

I have setup the class pages to be based off categories. I figure this would be a very easy way to manage the flow of information in dynamic fashion, without my continual tinkering. We will see if this will work. I figure this would be the easiest way to allow many people to post for different classes without them having to know too much. All they need to do is select their category—which I need to look into how to manage roles, it would be even better if I could limit who could post in which category.

I spent a lot of time looking at themes. This is always the worst part for me, because no theme is like I would want it to be. I have been toying around with the idea of creating my own theme for some time, and I think this recent work has only solitified that for me. After the initial learning curve, I could probably make a theme as fast as it takes to figure out someone else’s code and then edit it.

There are some neat tools that I used for this site.

Since a lot of the folks who will be using this site will probably not be extremely tech savy I wanted to make it extremely easy to stay connected via feeds. So I have created an subscribe by email which has both the posts and comments combined into it. I used yahoo pipes to combine the feeds, then feedburner to grab it from yahoo, then used feedburner’s email form to get people signed up.

I wish there was some way to have this combined feed created dynamically for each of the categories, because currently I have only created one combined feed for all the content on the site—which will work for the present time, but once traffic becomes higher it will become a lot more difficult for people to keep up only their class.

There are links to category specific feeds without comments right now, but I’m not sure how to combine that with the feedburner email form. The category feed links are created using the wp_list_categories() tag with the parameter of feed_image= added. I’m not sure how to get feedburner or yahoo pipes to grab that information without specifically telling it to. But then I would have to hand code each of the feeds for each category each time a new one is added.There must be a better way, that I’m just not seeing.

Something else I have added, to give people a place to see recent activity, is a three tabbed sidebar item which displays recent comments, recent posts, and popular posts. I found the code for the tabs through smashingmagazine.com. The recent comments and popular posts are through plugins and recent posts is via a nice code example on wordpress.org. {As a sidenote, if you try to use the popular posts plugin, you will need to find an edited version, via the wordpress forums, because the original version will not work with post 2.5 wordpres.}

This site also sports my first written php if else statement. I have a header image, and I wanted it to change depending on the category. So right now if you go to the site, you will see a default image which is cropped image of the colloseum, but when you go the Romans class it is a cropped image of a ancient statue. These images coincide with the images that are going on flyers and such around the church. So this should gain a sense of branding, or something like that, also it should add to sense of each category being independent of the others.

If you check the site out, please comment here about suggestions or any bugs you might see. I’m getting to the point where I can’t see my mistakes anymore because I have looked at it so much.

My daughter, Raine, (pictured below) received a nice card, from her granny, in the mail for thanksgiving, and like all good kids do, she recycled it into art.

The card wasn’t really a card at all but some type fancy flyer for her church—there was a image of the church with the name on it, backside being blank—I think it was about some new building project because the image looked computer generated. So it had actually already been re-purposed to be a card.

Which reminds of my days in college, I would go to the recycle bins to get paper for my note taking.

Under the image of the church, Raine made this really amazing drawing—I am a sucker for horizontally oriented elongated pieces. Ihave really liked my ‘plain’ minimalist design, and I hadn’t thought of adding anything fancy. But this pictured screamed out to me. It reminds me a lot of the picture I had on my old blog.

So I scanned it, cropped the church off, used my GIMP ‘skills’ to scribble out the “Peace Lutheran Church, Fort Meyers, Florida” which was in top half of the picture, and popped it into my header.php file (which was easy because there wasn’t much in the file to weed through; my wife’s, using the k2 theme, is a nightmare).

The size of the flash object had to be adjusted; I messed around until I got what looked like a good size for the current layout. But—and there is always a but with this stuff—it increased the object size right and down, instead of increasing from the center where all the content would still be centered. The problem with this is that I had, for some reason beyond me, to make the dimensions of the flash object much larger than what my layout is, to get the sizing right. But as I did that, it moved it where half the object was hanging off the side. This wasn’t too big a deal, because I knew I could just adjust the margins with CSS. I messed with the margins in firebug (a firefox plugin) to where I like it. That was the easy part.

My true difficulty came when I began to attempt to insert the changes into the style sheet. To be honest, I don’t really understand CSS very well, even though I have found myself messing with it numerous times now. I know that you use classes, divs, or ids to attach styles to, but when it comes to me getting this stuff to actually work {at all}, I pretty much fail a lot.

Looking in firebug I could see that the flash object was within the ‘ngg_simpleviewer1′ div which also had a class of ‘simpleviewer’. The problem with the div was that for each gallery (the site has like five of them) the div included the gallery id # at the end. So unless I wanted to add each special div in the CSS, that wasn’t going to work. Especially when she adds new galleries, I would have to manually edit the CSS. So i tried attaching it to the class—which also seemed very logical—but found only failure.

I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working. I tried using #simpleviewer & .simpleviewer; I wasn’t sure when you used each, but I knew that I’ve seen both used. Luckily, I was scanning the rest of the stylesheet for some clue and found this used: “.example img{“. That made me think, maybe that is what I need to do. So I tried .simpleviewer object {margin-left:-103px;} and it worked beautifully.

I don’t really understand why it wasn’t working without adding object. I am still very stupid when it comes to this stuff. Usually I know enough to know that it can be done, but not enough to know really how to do it, without google search after google search.I am at least getting to the point where I can at least get it done. It times past, I was just stuck without really knowing where to go at all.

I have looked at the library for a book on CSS but didn’t see any. I didn’t search the catalog to see if they were just out on loan or if the library is simply devoid of such knowledge. I know there is a lot online, but a lot of the stuff I found was too vague to understand the application of the principles or too specific for me to generalize.

{This type of application is probably really good for me, simply for the fact that it makes me work my brain a bit.}

Well it was easier than I thought it would be—though it still took me all evening to get it working.

So what did I do? Well using the “wp_get_bookmarks” you can add modifiers, one those being the have images. That part is rather easy, within the edit links page you add the address link to the image and you add the simple “show_images=1 /*boolean yes*/”.

The harder part was figuring out how to get each image to line up horizontally and not vertically (as a result of line breaks after each link). I had emailed Jake, asking him about it, and he suggested the use of “display:inline;” and possibly “float:left;”. These were the correct things, the problem was figuring out how to get them into the code so they would work.

One the wordpress codex page there is a list of the modifiers which to use witht the bookmarks call. I had read in the WP forums that I needed to use the before & after modifiers, but the descriptions on what that is exactly & how to use them was very brief. Luckily, after searching through about 5 pages of search results I found someone who had posted their code, which included a working example of the display:inline using the before & after.

So basically the before & after tells each link (each link is created into a seperate li) to use the display:inline style. The second part is to get the li changed to p so that the style can actually work correctly.

After getting this much done, it was simply a matter of aesthetics, with padding & font size. So here is what the finished code looked like & then a screen shot of the finished design.

     &after=
     &title_before=

     &title_after=
     &categorize=0
     &show_images=1
     &show_description=1
'); ?>

Here are a few more resources which I found very informative and helpful.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/taminglists/

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/practicalcss/

http://amberperrodin.com/?page_id=54