Martha.net

Now that I’m more or less settled into the new WordPress Theme, it’s time to start documenting the changes!

This time around I’m building the modifications the right way and using a Child Theme to tweak the main theme: Boilerplate 3.0. (If you’re looking for ways to tweak thumbnails in Mystique, I have a post on how to hack the old version 2.4.2 here.)

The following code will add a thumbnail of the post’s featured image or the default category icon. I only use it on the front page, but it can be used with any of the loops. Continue reading →

Code Code Code

I’ve finally gotten the childtheme for Boilerplate 3.0 where I can live with it, so I’m swapping over from the old Mystique 2.4.2 today.

I’ll be doing some tweaking over the weekend, but you can expect the ‘how did you do that?’ posts to follow in the near future. It’s been a bit of a learning curve, but I’m really liking the way the childtheme handles!

And now back to work… *puts on coding hardhat and climbs back into the guts*

Vroom!

I think it’s time to break out the theme chainsaw and start doing some renovations. *pokes website*

Right now I’m running a modified/tweaked version 2.4.2 of the Mystique Theme written by digitalnature. This is an older version, but I’m reluctant to upgrade because the theme was completely rebuilt and I’d have to start over from scratch.

Assuming the time I’ve spent tweaking Mystique so far is a sunk cost, I’m faced with either retracing my steps with Mystique or starting from scratch. Since there are a lot of things that Mystique does that I don’t need (or want) it to do— I’m going with scratch(ish). Continue reading →

You may have noticed I did a little bit of tweaking to the Single Post next/previous navigation in the hopes of making the archives a little more user friendly. Mystique uses next_post_link and previous_post_link which default to a time-based navigation—which isn’t helpful when most of my users are more interested in categories.

I couldn’t find any good plug-ins for multi-category navigation (which is odd) so I popped open single.php and started playing. Continue reading →

From Ages Past

Ah, the joys of trying to get old content back in front of readers!

With over 1,200 posts in the archives, I’m hunting down ways of laying breadcrumbs down for the older writing. Since ‘related post’ plug-ins are incredibly hit and miss (given the nature of the Multiblog) I’ve written the following code for single post pages. Continue reading →

Earlier Posts

I’ve tweaked the Mystique WordPress Theme created by Digital Nature (v2.4.2) quite a bit since I started playing around with it in March 2010. The most obvious difference (other than replacing the menu bar with icons) was the way posts were presented on the front page.

I mucked around with the query_posts functionality until I coaxed it into displaying the most recent post from each category and then the next four most recent posts in a list below that.

However I’m now going to swap over to just the first post and I figured I’d preserve the code here in case I wanted to use it again… or if anyone else wanted to give it a spin. Continue reading →

194 Drafts, 19 Scheduled. Sigh.

Content is King… or at least it is according to the 1,490,000 results on Google. (Ignore the bit where four of the links on the front page celebrate the death of the phrase.)

Opinions may change, but numbers don’t lie: my dearth of content in July resulted in a rather significant drop in traffic over the same time period. I have been neither entertaining nor educational and traffic is back to its pre-June levels. Continue reading →

In my continual quest to muck about in the PHP coding for this theme, I have run into the frustrating problem of having to figure out which functions are hidden where. Thus I am posting a few index pages so I can use the search function on this blog as a cheat sheet.

As I write posts translating the various functions I’ll link them from the indexes.

I know Mystique is continually updated and expanded, so some of these will apply only to version 2.4.2. Please check your code before changing anything! Continue reading →

I know Mystique is continually updated and expanded, so some of these will apply only to version 2.4.2. Please check your code before changing anything! Continue reading →

A'Coding We Will Go!

I’ve been trying to sort out the answer to a question asked on Hacking the Tagline about backgrounds and headers, so I’m pulling apart mystique_logo() from header.php to see what makes it tick. This is a step-by-step overview of what each line does and where the functions it uses are located.

Although I don’t have the newest version of the theme, hopefully this will help others who are trying to tweak mystique_logo() — which contains the blog title or the selected title image.

So let’s pop open Appearance -> Editor and read on… Continue reading →