This afternoon I posted an update to my Sandbox-LEGO theme. In the process of developing my CASL Soccer theme I had figured out how to do a couple things which I have wanted to incorporate into Sandbox-LEGO. It wasn’t a lot of work but I also decided to spend the time to re-write the Bourne Shell script which I use to generate CSS files for the various color schemes. Instead of duplicating a bunch of code I implemented it as a series of functions which are called with the various color settings. Fairly trivial looking back on it, not sure why I hadn’t done it in the first place. It should make adding a new color scheme much faster.
I have not done much work on wp-SwimTeam over the past few months but about a week ago I dusted off my virtual machine (have I ever mentioned how much I love VMware Workstation?) in preparation for the upcoming season. Since I last worked on the project there have been numerous patches for Windows XP (my development area is an XP VM) and WordPress has moved from 2.7 through the 2.8.x releases and is now on 2.9.1.
All new work will be done against 2.9.1 (for now) so I have upgraded WordPress and the plugins that I use in conjunction with wp-SwimTeam. There are two areas where I will focus on immediately – importing results which I never finished last year and volunteer management. I’ll probably finish the portion of results I am working on right now and then move on to volunteer management since we’ll need that functionality in March when the MacDolphins do registration.
The CASL Ambassadors web site is actually a collection of WordPress blogs – the main site plus one for each of six age group teams. When I initially set it up I tried using WordPress-MU but my hosting solution wasn’t capable for MU’s requirements. Then I tried a plugin called WP-Hive which allows a collection of blogs to share some common infrastructure. Wp-Hive looked promising but I ran into some concerns which kept me from using it.
Ultimately I ended up setting up a separate blog for each site and hoped to come back to it at some point. That point was a couple weeks ago when I decided to do some maintenance on the sites. I ended up using the main installation as a parent and linked (using Unix symbolic links) all of the sub-domain sites back to parent. The only exception was the wp-content directory which is a real directory (so uploads can be unique) but within wp-content I linked back to the parent’s themes and plugins.
This worked pretty well – if I install a plugin or theme for the main site it is available for all of the sub-domain sites and when I upgrade WordPress, all of the sub-domain sites are upgraded as well. Once I got this running, I wanted to share the users across all blogs.
After several attempts and numerous Google searches, I ended up following the directions in this thread and this thread and got everything to work. I don’t particularly care for having to modify one of the core WordPress files since it will go away the next time I update WordPress but none of the other solutions I tried worked.
The CASL Ambassadors web site is actually a collection of WordPress blogs – the main site plus one for each of six age group teams. When I initially set it up I tried using WordPress-MU but my hosting solution wasn’t capable for MU’s requirements. Then I tried a plugin called WP-Hive which allows a collection of blogs to share some common infrastructure. Wp-Hive looked promising but I ran into some concerns which kept me from using it.
Ultimately I ended up setting up a separate blog for each site and hoped to come back to it at some point. That point was a couple weeks ago when I decided to do some maintenance on the sites. I ended up using the main installation as a parent and linked (using Unix symbolic links) all of the sub-domain sites back to parent. The only exception was the wp-content directory which is a real directory (so uploads can be unique) but within wp-content I linked back to the parent’s themes and plugins.
This worked pretty well – if I install a plugin or theme for the main site it is available for all of the sub-domain sites and when I upgrade WordPress, all of the sub-domain sites are upgraded as well. Once I got this running, I wanted to share the users across all blogs.
After several attempts and numerous Google searches, I ended up following the directions in this thread and this thread and got everything to work. I don’t particularly care for having to modify one of the core WordPress files since it will go away the next time I update WordPress but none of the other solutions I tried worked.
Today I spent some more time working with the Facebook Connect plugin. It pretty much works as adverized. Using the wp_meta hook I was able to displY the Facebook login status on the Meta widget.
With a little bit of styling it looks well integrated with the theme I am using. You can see the it in action on the CASL Shocks web site.
I have been doing some testing with the WordPress Facebook Connect plugin. There are a couple sites I work with, particularly our swim team web site, MacDolphins.org, where I need users to login and add data to the site. Each year when we do swim team registration I get lots of questions about how to register, forgotten usernames and passwords, etc. With the popularity of Facebook, I am thinking that leveraging Facebook login credentials could make things a lot easier for me and our swim team parents.
As a test, I have installed it on the site I am putting together for my youngest daughter’s soccer team (CASL Sharks) to see how it works. For the most part, I am impressed – it pretty much works as advertised. I was able to login using my Facebook login and once my user was added to the WordPress user tables, I could change my permissions to allow my Facebook user id to post. I still need to do some work to support Facebook Connect for comments but the instructions look pretty straight forward. I think this would work well for the NCLTC and NCLUG sites as well although Facebook Connect requires PHP5 and those sites are hosted on a PHP4 based server so I’ll have to sort that out.
I use Flickr to host my photos and I’ve always wanted a better way to present them on WordPress blogs and this weekend I think I found it. Flickr-Gallery is a great plugin. It is easy to set up and use and it integrates well with my theme. It has a nice selection of short code options.
The only thing I use which is missing is the ability to link or preferably, display, a slide show. I shoot a lot of pictures of our kids activities (skateboarding, soccer, basketball, swim team, etc.) and sharing them as a Flickr slide show is something I do frequently.
I found a solution to the missing slide show by using the Light Window plugin in conjunction with the Flickr URL for the slide show I am interested in presenting.
This afternoon I finally had a few minutes to fix a couple of issues and release my LEGO theme. This theme is currently in use on my LEGO web site. The theme free to download and use. There are still a couple minor nits with it which I need to fix and I want to add a couple more color schemes but I wanted to get it out. It supports four colors schemes – red, blue, green, and yellow. Enjoy.
This afternoon I finally had a few minutes to fix a couple of issues and release my LEGO theme. This theme is currently in use on my LEGO web site. The theme free to download and use. There are still a couple minor nits with it which I need to fix and I want to add a couple more color schemes but I wanted to get it out. It supports four colors schemes – red, blue, green, and yellow. Enjoy.
This morning Imade some more progress on the LEGO theme. It is close to being released. In fact, I was about to release it when I realized that the two different sized bricks for the page background wasn’t working. Looks like I had deferred working on that. The options work fine, they just don’t do anything as the size is currently hard coded into to the CSS file.
I did fix the problem with the Recent Comments widget as also added support for the WpTwitter widget. I’ll noodle on how to get the size working as I go about my day today (chuch, soccer, etc.) and try and figure something out. I also need to fix the footer links and add attribution to the Fibblesnork background images.
Here is what the yellow color scheme looks like:
ColorBlender seems to have come back on line which makes picking colors much easier.
