Blog Lafayette

I finally got my wife’s blog website, www.seasonedwithtime.com finished and converted over to become the main website of Seasoned With Time. Working with all of the little things I had to do to get the javascript, php, iframes and the rest all working within the framework of a WordPress blog was quite interesting. The main reason that we switched our site to a WordPress.org self hosted platform was that we wanted to be able to allow easier manipulation of the content on the site. WordPress makes a great content management system.

For those of you who may be thinking of switching to WordPress and aren’t sure of all the steps to take, don’t be shy about sending me a message and asking questions. I will be glad to offer any help with the process that I can. Certainly no reason for you to have to re-invent the wheel so to speak when I and others have been down that road already.

Live well everyone!

For the last couple of weeks I have been working on my wife’s blog, trying to give it more functionality and ability to present more in the sidebars and such. It has been a learning process. In an earlier post I said that I would be bringing out the details of some of the knowledge I gained in this process. Here is a little bit of that knowledge.

One of the problems I was trying to solve was how to make different widgets and content show up on different pages. I didn’t want a cookie cutter approach where all my sidebar content looked exactly the same on every page. My solution? Two very useful WordPress plugins. They were “Custom Post Widget” and “Widget Logic”.

The “Custom Post Widget” is a great tool that allows the webmaster or author to create individually saved bits of content that can each be moved over to the sidebar area in admin as needed. The best part about the widget is that it allows the content to be authored using the Visual editor in WordPress. This allows formatting of the fonts, uploading images and everything else you can do with the visual editor. This is a much better solution than using the standard “Text” widget which does not allow easy formatting of the content.

That is great, but what about the ability to make these content blocks appear on different pages and posts and in different locations on those pages and posts? This is where “Widget Logic” comes in. “Widget Logic” puts an extra field in the bottom of each widget that you put in the sidebar area of your blog that allows you to tell the widget with a little piece of code which pages it can show up on. The bits of code are called, “Conditional Tags”. Conditional tags allow me to point the widget to only the pages or posts that meet the conditions of the tag. For instance, say I want a block of text to only show up on my Home page and my About Me page but nowhere else. I would drag the content block over to the sidebar area in my admin that contains that text content. I would enter the code, is_home() in the widget logic field in the bottom of that widget, and then click save. I would add another content block with the same text to the sidebar, and enter the code, is_page('about-me'), where “about-me” is the title slug for my About Me page, and click save.

Viola! I’m done. Took me about 30 seconds, and the text in that widget is only showing up on my Home page and my About Me page.

For further information about Conditional Tags go to the link, http://codex.wordpress.org/Conditional_Tags. To get the two plugins mentioned, just go to your plugins page, go to “Add New”, type in the names of the plugins into the search field, and install each when it comes up.

Hope this was a help. Happy blogging Lafayette and all!

I have spent the last several days redesigning another WordPress site and I am just about done. It is amazing how much time working through learning new bits and pieces of technologies can take but I am grateful for the knowledge I have gained through this process. Over the next few weeks I will intersperse articles about the steps I took to install and configure the new plug-ins and such. I hope that I will be able to cut the time short for the next person who comes along trying to figure out how to get their WordPress site to do more than it does out of the box so to speak.

In a story today in Lafayette’s Journal and Courier newspaper, I was glad to hear that the rate of foreign students enrolling in Indiana colleges took a big jump this last year. That is good news for us locally because of Purdue University. Purdue enrolled 6900 foreign students to take the lead in the state in enrollments. That is good for our local economy. In this present time of a down economy and fewer jobs, anything that brings up the money coming into our community is a plus. I am also grateful for Purdue University and it’s reputation. We have one of the best Universities in the United States right here in our own city. Just one more reason why I like living in Lafayette Indiana.