Wow, something like 11 days until the Go Green California Business site is supposed to launch. Is it time to panic yet?
Admittedly, I’m running into a few problems (not site-building-related) that make me a little nervous, but sometimes there are things that are beyond your control that you can’t worry about. Or at least try to channel your best Zen and not worry about them. Personally, I always remind myself that there are only certain things I can control and I’m going to go right on controlling those things.
Like starting the WordPress conversion of this site.
The Illustrator file had been made into a pretty little HTML file and my CSS was written. And so I dove right into WordPress.
It had been a little while since I’d done my last custom WordPress project, so I had forgotten a few things when I started. At the top of that list? Don’t name any of your files home.php! Since I forgot that cardinal rule, I spent a good long time trying to figure out why my front page wasn’t showing what I expected it to be showing. Duh.
After overcoming that, um, hiccup, there came the business of actually creating WordPress templates. If you’ve never done this before, it’s always a good idea to look at what files are contained in the default theme and make sure you have the same ones. (I once forgot to put a comments.php file in a custom theme I built and no one could leave comments!) So that’s how I first take stock of what should be done.
The next thing I do is determine how many different templates I need. The front page of this project isn’t your regular ol’ blog, so that was going to be its own template. All the pages needed a template, so there was another template. The actual blog page needed its own treatment too. And some of the other information pages didn’t need a fancy graphic header, so I needed a template for that.
The results are below.
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- Front page
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- Latest News page
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- Single story page
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- Information page
For the front page, I only needed to call a list of the blog posts. I’m still trying to decide if I’m going to create pages for the ad space and then call in the contents of those pages to show up on the front page. Making the ads their own separate pages would make it easier for my client to update and change around the ads more easily. And then I’d have to employ multiple loops, which sometimes leaves me loopy. (This article is a terrific explanation of how to implement multiple loops in WordPress; I’ve used it many, many times.)
But as Alton Brown of “Good Eats” would say, that’s another show.
The other kicker in this project is that the hosting for this site isn’t set up yet. And I didn’t want to be handcuffed by not having server space to play with. But I stumbled on an article a while ago about setting up your own server. It recommended using MAMP to set up a MySQL and an Apache/PHP server. (It works for Macs; I’m sure there’s a great PC equivalent.) It took a little while for me to figure out where to put my files and how to make it work with Dreamweaver, but holy cow! MAMP is a terrific little program and it’s made the testing of this site so much easier.
Now I can only hope that things go as well when it moves to a live server!
