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I just updated my WordPress installation from 3.2 to 3.3. The upgrade was running but then the page directed to this message:
Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.
The front page and wp-admin both showed this unstyled message. After a quick search I found that simply deleting the .maintenance file via FTP will remove this. Perhaps it’s a bug in this version, perhaps something went wrong. But after deleting that file everything seems to be working well. And I must say I like the design tweaks in WordPress 3.3.
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I’ve created plenty of WordPress themes based on designs from clients. This is the process I usually follow.
1. Create a static HTML and CSS template. I create index.html and style.css.
2. Install WordPress
3. In the WordPress folder wp-content/themes/ I create a folder with the name of my new theme.
4. Copy my static HTML to the new theme folder.
5. Modify style.css, add the WordPress stylesheet header:
/*
Theme Name: THEME_NAME
Theme URI: YOUR_WEBSITE
Description: THEME_DESC
Version: 0.1
Author: YOUR_NAME
*/
6. Rename index.html to index.php. Open index.php and replace the reference to style.css with < ?php bloginfo( 'stylesheet_url' ); ?>
7. In wp-admin, go to Appearance -> Themes and select my new theme. It will still be completely static but this is the starting point for the real WordPress theme development.
8. Create the file header.php ; move the header stuff from index.php into this file. For me this is generally from first line (the DOCTYPE) down to the start of the main content area. In index.php I insert <?php get_header(); ?> to load the contents of header.php.
9. Similarly I create footer.php and sidebar.php and then move the lines from index.php into those files, and replace with <?php get_footer(); ?> and <?php get_sidebar(); ?> respectively.
10. Edit header.php, so that it looks something like this (this is HTML5):
<!doctype html>
<html <?php language_attributes(); ?>>
<head>
<meta charset="<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />
<title><?php wp_title(); ?> <?php bloginfo( 'name' ); ?></title>
<link rel="profile" href="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo( 'stylesheet_url' ); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<link rel="pingback" href="<?php bloginfo( 'pingback_url' ); ?>" />
<?php wp_enqueue_script('jquery'); //only use if you need jquery?>
<?php wp_head(); //this does a lot of stuff ?>
<!--[if IE]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/style-ie.css" type="text/css"></link>
<![endif]-->
</head>
<body <?php body_class(); ?>>
<div id="Main">
<header>
<div id="Holder">
<h1><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h1>
<h2><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></h2>
</div>
<nav>
<?php wp_page_menu(); ?>
</nav>
<div class="clear"></div>
</header>
11. Edit index.php, remove the static content and insert The Loop code, which looks like this:
<?php get_header(); ?> <div id="Content"> <?php //The Loop if( have_posts() ) : while( have_posts() ) : the_post(); echo '<h1>'.get_the_title().'</h1>'; the_content(); endwhile; endif; //end the loop ?> </div><!--Content--> <?php get_sidebar(); ?> <?php get_footer(); ?>
If there are other files in your theme directory, use
<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/
… eg:
<link href="<?php bloginfo("template_url"); ?>/webfonts/bauhaus.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
12. In footer.php I might have something like:
<footer>
© <?php echo date('Y').' '; bloginfo('name'); ?>
</footer>
</div><!--Wrap-->
<?php wp_footer(); ?>
</body>
</html>
At this point we should see our theme loading content dynamically from WordPress. But this is just the start…
See the WordPress Template Checklist for a more thorough guide to everything you might need.
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Or any type of file, really. I needed to quickly remove links from an old website that was using flat HTML files. In my linux command line, I found I could do:
perl -pi -e 's/SEARCH/REPLACE/g' *.html
To replace all instances of SEARCH with REPLACE in *.html.
Except I needed to do a fair bit of escaping, because HTML is full of characters that mean something else on the command line.
So let’s say the string I needed to remove was:
<a title="Search Engine Optimisation" href="http://superspammyseocompany.com/" target="_self"><span>Search Engine Optimisation</span></a> by <a title="Super Spammy SEO Company" href="http://superspammyseocompany.com/" target="_self">Super Spammy SEO Company</a>
I copy + pasted this into vim, and then every time these characters occur:
< , >, / and ”
I put a \ in front of each of these, which gave me:
\<a title=\"Search Engine Optimisation\" href=\"http:\/\/superspammyseocompany.com\/\" target=\"_self\"\>\<span\>Search Engine Optimisation\<\/span\>\<\/a\> by \<a title=\"Super Spammy SEO Company\" href=\"http:\/\/superspammyseocompany.com\/\" target=\"_self\">Super Spammy SEO Company\<\/a\>
Which was a bit of work, but still much more fun than manually removing the link from each file.
Note that these characters do not need to be escaped with a backslash:
= (equals), . (dot), and _ (underscore)
So my final command was:
perl -pi -e 's\\<a title=\"Search Engine Optimisation\" href=\"http:\/\/superspammyseocompany.com\/\" target=\"_self\"\>\<span\>Search Engine Optimisation\<\/span\>\<\/a\> by \<a title=\"Super Spammy SEO Company\" href=\"http:\/\/superspammyseocompany.com\/\" target=\"_self\">Super Spammy SEO Company\<\/a\>//' *.html
I’d already initialised a git repository and committed the files so I could easily restore the files in case of a mistake. A quick look through the links showed it all worked perfectly, and it saved me so much time I thought I’d write this post about it.
Bonus: I outputted all the changed files to list.html, which had one filename per line, like:
./file1.html ./file2.html ./file3.html
Here’s the vim command to turn them all into links, for easy human checking:
:%s/^\(.*\)$/<a href="\1">\1\<\/a\>\<\/br\>
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Late yesterday afternoon a client asked if I could look at a business’s WordPress installation. They had posts in several categories but only wanted to show the “Latest News” posts in the archives.
WordPress is designed around blog posts, whereas I find that many business or company sites are designed around pages (eg About Us, Contact Us) – and don’t use WordPress’ powerful blogging tools on the front page. My site is an example – the content on the home page doesn’t change that much.
This means that many of the solutions are also geared around blog-post design.
While searching I found a few examples of how to exclude a specific category from the archives, when what I needed was to include only one category in the WordPress archives – generated in the theme by wp_get_archives().
The solution is to add a filter that modifies the SQL used by wp_get_achives() to the theme’s function.php:
add_filter( 'getarchives_where', 'customarchives_where' );
add_filter( 'getarchives_join', 'customarchives_join' );
function customarchives_join( $x ) {
global $wpdb;
return $x . " INNER JOIN $wpdb->term_relationships ON ($wpdb->posts.ID = $wpdb->term_relationships.object_id) INNER JOIN $wpdb->term_taxonomy ON ($wpdb->term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id = $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id)";
}
function customarchives_where( $x ) {
global $wpdb;
$include = '1'; // category id to include
return $x . " AND $wpdb->term_taxonomy.taxonomy = 'category' AND $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_id IN ($include)";
}
Replace ’1′ with the category ID (wp-admin > posts > categories > edit, then in the address bar it is directly after ‘&tag_ID’) and that’s it. wp_get_archives() will now only display posts from that category.
I found this in http://wordpress.org/support/topic/wp_get_archives-and-conditional-tags?replies=6#post-1578041 (thanks Paul!).