Nose to the WordPress

This past week has been largely about prepping for the great WordPress 3.0 migration. So…programming, theme-building, and some interesting little hacks that have allowed me to level-up a bit with WP3.

I’ve already moved my art site. It was transferred during beta 2 (we’re now at RC-1), but has been under some construction since. While I have WP3 also running on my development system, I needed one that was in the “real world” to ensure the things I do off-line will reflect what happens with the on-line configuration. Some interesting weirdness does go on (the “featured images” feature was quite vexing for a while), but all-in-all the differences have been few and minor.

The art site is interesting in that it’s utilizing two of the touted features of WP3: custom post types; and custom taxonomies. I had to make some decisions about whether to go that route, but in the end it proved to be (probably) the best solution. The main reason I can see for going to the trouble of using custom post types is so that you can screw around with the interface for specific types of posts without mucking up the interface for more general posts and pages.

Huh?

Here’s the deal: to make things a little more consistent, I opted to use custom taxonomies (think of them as purpose-built category or tags) for a certain type of post. Thing is, those boxes will show up all the time if attached to either regular posts or pages. It clutters things up. So, I made a custom post type which allowed me to have the taxonomy boxes in the interface while still allowing the post/page interfaces to be the same a usual.

Between taxonomies, and custom fields, I’ve managed to kludge together a not-too-onerous solution, but it’s not at all elegant. It also means I have to be very mindful of migrating that section of my functions.php file should I change themes.

Speaking of themes, the one I’ve been building is a child theme for the new twenty-ten theme that is the new WP3 default. I’ve found it to be a little quirky, especially with the headers. Why? Well, the headers are derived from the featured images (aka thumbnails). I found it distracting/problematic and had to remove that functionality from my child theme. All-in-all, though, twenty-ten has been a good foundation for mucking around without having to do things up from scratch — which I did try and resulted in some pretty interesting side-effects. For now, I think that building a child theme based on an established and stable theme is definitely the way to go for customization with WP3 if you plan to use the new features.

So… the day is soon coming when the old sites (including this one) will be moved. When that happens, I’ll temporarily turn off new user registration as well as comments. Once everything seems to be working, they’ll be turned on again. I’m still toying with the idea of moving the Connor Wars stuff to a site all its own…that would also likely mean moving the forum. If I do, I’ll likely also include the same TIB users with that site as well, since I have no way of knowing how to separate all of y’all. That way there will be little disruption. Still haven’t 100% decided on doing that, though. It’s still a stay-tuned sort of deal.

With any luck, other than a bit of a face-lift to the themes in the not-too-distant-future, you shouldn’t notice a thing. This one is pretty much all on me. Stay tuned.