Author: isaac

Let’s say you don’t want your home page to be your weblog for some reason. You still want it to use the same style stuff as the rest of your blog though, and it’d be nice if you could manage your homepage as a WP Page. Here’s how to do it:

1. Edit Options:Permalinks, adding the name of your blog folder to the front of the permalink code, something like this: /blog/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
2. Create your main page as a Page, noting its ID on the Manage screen.
3. Install the Page to Front plugin, giving it your main page’s ID.
4. Make a new template page like the Archives template, but with The Loop. Add this just above The Loop in your template: < ? php query_posts("showposts=10"); ?>
5. Create a page that uses the new template, naming its post slug with the name of the folder you want your blog to be in.

Pretty complicated! There really should be a plugin that does all this…

If you have a plugin installed that’ll allow PHP in a post or page to execute (such as Ezstatic), you can embed parts of the Photopress album right in a page or post. Just insert

< ?php pp_display_cat('CategoryName'); ?>

in the page or post, making sure to check the box enabling PHP execution. This will insert a list of linked thumbnails from whatever category you choose.

Makes it much easier to customize the default WordPress template. Just replace my ugly 760×200 layer with your own and export it from Gimp as a JPEG.

Download kubrickheader.zip.

Bugs keep appearing, so I won’t give it a new version number yet, but it’s getting there. The major change is in the album, which now supports categories that can be edited at Manage: Photopress Album.

Try it out: photopress.zip or photopress.tar.gz

To upgrade, you should be able to just overwrite the old files. If you were using an earlier version that required Ezstatic, you’ll need to fix any linked thumbs you may have inserted into posts – the Browse tool makes this pretty easy though.

You can also go to wp-plugins.org to download bleeding-edge files directly.

Try it out: photopress.zip or photopress.tar.gz

The major improvements are 1) an Options page instead of the old config file and 2) GIF and PNG support. I don’t think I did anything to help the button problems some people are having, but you never know. Give it a try and let me know how it goes.

Make sure you at least view the options page, even if you don’t plan on changing them – otherwise the plugin won’t have any options to work with. I’d imagine I can write some code to use some defaults if the plugin doesn’t find any options variables in the database – I’ll try to figure that out for the next version.

If you inserted linked thumbs in posts using an earlier version that used Ezstatic, you should go back and edit those posts to use the new album. The Browse button should make this very easy. I’d like to figure out some generalized way to put a linked thumb in a post so that messing with the album or changing where images are located doesn’t break stuff like it does now…