I’ve been experimenting a lot with WordPress lately, but more on the aspect of using WordPress as a CMS than just a theme. Well, ok, I haven’t exactly been “experimenting” per se. I’ve been using WordPress as a CMS for my clients’ sites.

So far, I’ve managed to create category-dependent templates for “portal type” sites (ie. m|ph). But it’s STILL category-dependent, meaning: a category-dependent theme can’t be user-friendly enough to be released as a GPL theme. It definitely goes beyond the “blog look,” but it’s not that easy to modify.

I’ve been meaning to experiment skinning Scott’s Sandbox theme, but again, I can’t seem to find the time to. I haven’t really taken the time to look into the code. But from what I’ve read so far, skinning Sandbox isn’t as easy as creating your own CSS (well, I find making my own CSS code and structure easier than working on an existing one), but it does have some nifty features that makes it easily customizable by the end-user.

BlogHelper is doing a series on using WordPress as a CMS, tackling the different types such as a portfolio, e-commerce, news site, photoblog and the like. Though “basic” for a seasoned “themer,” it’s still a bit advanced. And if you’re the type who faints at the sight of PHP codes, the tutorial series might not be the best for you.

That’s actually what I was hoping to do: create a “CMS” theme with very minor code editing for the user (actually, it would be much better if they don’t have to edit anything AT ALL). But so far, the nearest “theme with no code edits” I’ve made was the theme for Hinge-Inquirer Publications. (Hey, that’s a copyrighted client site, so hands-off please! It’s not a GPL theme).

The objective of that project was basically create a design based on the client’s brand, then integrate it into WordPress which would be the CMS. Posts will be the “news articles,” while the Pages, will be pages (duh). After I integrated the design into the WordPress theme files, I just uploaded it and activated the theme from the Admin panel. Wolah! It no longer looks like a WordPress “blog.”

This might be the nearest solution to my little “experiment.” But the thing is, I still needed to manually edit the links on the top navigation bar (there is a way to make it automatically appear, but I couldn’t afford having all Page links on the top bar—some really needed to be at the bottom part). Well, still needs a bit of work, but I think this could do the trick. It’s the nearest “upload and activate” CMS-type theme I can make.

Now, all I need to do is find the time to actually implement these themes in transit and have them up at the WP Theme Viewer for download

Congratulations to the other winners!

Thank you to everyone who supported my work… and thanks too to those who didn’t Oddly enough, I find the “negative vibe” extremely entertaining (ahh… the wonders of Technorati, also helps me keep track of those who hate my themes hehehe).

I’ve seen my name come up in a few times in the increasingly long comments thread of contest results. Some aren’t very nice. Not to be arrogant or anything, but the “negativity” just makes me want to roll my eyes and snort. Call me calloused, but I’m used to it. You should hear my dad criticize my work. He’s an artist and a photojournalist, and my critic for important client projects.

However, one of the comments caught my eye:

wank said,
May 17, 2006 @ 7:26 am
David: does this mean you consider Gail Dela Cruz undeserving of her gift certificate? That’s harsh, and might have been better kept to yourself. If you think she’s more of a coder than a photoshopper I have to wonder where your eyes are.

I must tell you that this made me feel really flattered. Getting a compliment like that from Wank is very flattering indeed. I’m not being sarcastic here, don’t get me wrong. I’ve long been a reader and a fan of his blog—the way he writes his entries makes me laugh. So you can just imagine how pleased I was when I saw his comment about me.

And yes, Wank, you’re right. I am a photoshopper. Been a photoshopper for almost 10 years now

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There isn’t a rule in the contest that I can’t show you guys my theme entry, so I guess it’s ok. The Isla theme won’t be downloadable until Terry makes the theme entries available for download… and I’m not sure when that’ll be. I’m not trying to play hard-to-get here or anything, just thought it would be courtesy to not release this entry ahead of the others. I’m honestly not banking on winning any awards in this contest (man, Phu Ly makes me feel like an amateur!), but there really isn’t any harm in trying, right?

Anyway, the screenshot:

“Isla” is the Filipino term for “Island.” As I have said, it’s summer here—it’s so damn hot that you’d want to just lock yourself inside the freezer all day. I honestly want to take a vacation, and just lie around the beach with my family, fiance, and dogs (in Boracay Island to be more specific), but I just got too many things to do and leaving work for a couple of days could be suicide. Since I can’t take the Web to the beach, I just took the beach on the Web

The Isla theme is one of the first fluid layouts I’ve created ever since the invention of CSS (Are those image-text-image with blinky text and scrolling marquees of the ’90s considered fluid layouts? Hehe. I don’t know). Anyway, it’s not a thing I normally do, so I thought I’d give it a try.

I hope you guys will like it… When it’s released

I guess I’m a bit lucky to be able to address two concerns in one post: both questions actually pertain to the same concept: The the_excerpt template tag within the WP loop. Josie’s and Nikita’s questions are different by nature, but can be answered using the same concept.

Oh, before anything… Thank you Nikita for pointing it out to me. I’ve released an updated version (v.1.1) of the Dapit Hapon theme. The release doesn’t include any drastic changes, I just added a class in the CSS to make the protected single page look better. I wouldn’t have noticed it if it weren’t for Nikita’s question

Anyway, going back.

If you’ve already looked at the index.php and the single.php pages of this theme, you will notice that I used different template tags for the entry text. In the index.php one, I used the the_excerpt template tag, while on the single page, I used the_content.

So basically, that’s the reason why you only get the excerpt when you’re on the homepage. It’s actually a personal preferrence—I don’t like loading everything (like a hundred lines of text) when my index page is first visited. I don’t know… I guess this is where my web designer side gets the better of me I suppose the mentality that “a properly optimized site should fit in a 1.44mb diskette” of the early Internet years where high-speed connections are still ridiculously expensive hasn’t died on me yet. Well, anyway, that’s the concept behind it. In order to “force” creating excerpts, I used the the_excerpt tag. This way, even if you don’t specify an excerpt for your post, it automatically creates one by getting the first 120 words in your post.

However, graphics and HTML tags are stripped from these excerpts. That’s why your password-protected text field doesn’t show up on the index page, Nikita Click on the post name link and it’ll show up on the single page view. There is a workaround though, which is basically the same solution for Josie’s question.

When you open up the index.php page, the highlighted tag on the screenshot tells you where the the_excerpt tag is located:

That’s what we need to edit to achieve the effect Josie wants to accomplish: to remove “[...]” from the end of the excerpt and replace it with “continue reading” link.

Once you’ve located the tag, all you need to do is change it to:

You can even create a new style for this link and add a class=”yourstyle” for the html tags within the apostrophes. The WordPress documentation for this template tag discusses this with more detail.

However, unlike the the_excerpt tag that automatically generate “120-word summaries” for your posts, you will have to specify the point at which the excerpt will end. You need to put right after the last word you want to be seen in the excerpt while in the Post editor of the WordPress Admin. That’s actually another reason why I made it to automatically create excerpts (even though I’m stuck with the [...] thing at the end of my posts), I’m too lazy to do that on every post. I might even forget to do that Hehe.

Anyway, that’s it. Just play around with these two template tags (just make sure their within the “entrytext” DIV or the styling will screw up). Enjoy!

I’m not a programmer, but I can say his theme viewer is cool. It has a Vote feature, as well as the usual Download and Preview links. You can also see there how many times a theme has been downloaded. The only problem I encountered was getting a parse error when I tried to upload the theme (well, anyway, I’ve already informed the Silkjaer about it so I guess he’s already fixing the bug).

Ahh… I love opensource!

It’s a good thing I didn’t wait for this competition to release the entries before I launched my Dapit Hapon Theme. I would have waited for God-knows-how-long if I did. I wasn’t even sure if the guy received my entry in the first place (all I received from him was an automated reply). I’m not the world’s most patient person (ask my fiance, he’ll VERIFY that as fact), but this is becoming ridiculous. First, internet problem was the excuse. Then now, his site is hacked. Ok. It’s sad, I even sympathized with the guy, but it’s been too long already. He can’t have deleted all of our themes from his harddrive can he? His database might have been screwed, but he can always start from scratch in uploading the themes. I understand it’s a tedious process, but I don’t think it would hurt to upload three or four a day. Doing so would at least appease those who are beginning to feel they’ve been had.

Oh, well. As they say, shit happens. Well anyway, there’s a site that’s reviving this WP 2 Competition (this one came from people frequenting the WP support forums). I’m really not vying to win any awards on this, but the exposure will be good enough for me