galactica-science.com

Over in http://www.galactica-science.com/europa-and-the-moon-in-water/#comment-24 fiel asked about how to make his posts look like mine. His website is http://www.madeinmundo.com . You should take a look at my style.css sheet at:

http://www.galactica-science.com/wp-content/themes/unstandard/style.css

In your style.css at madeinmundo.com, you have:

.post.single p em { color: #fff; font-style: normal; background: #f9f9de; }

My style.css says:

.post.single p em { font-style: italic; }

If you want italics, that’s what you need to do. So, that’s a start.

It looks like you have 5 big posts and zero small on your front page now at http://www.madeinmundo.com. I guess you figured out the solution? I modified The Unstandard’s home.php file, deleting the part that shows the smaller posts there.

In my sidebar, I’m considering using the small images of the posts there, instead of text. What do you think?

Magneto, here is how to use Timthumb to resize the post images.

In home.php, replace this:

< ?php $image = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘lead_image’, true); ?>

with this:

< ?php $image = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘lead_image’, true);
if ((! $image) || (! file_exists(”.$image”)))
$image = “/images/lead-default.jpg”;
?>
< ?php if (file_exists('./scripts/timthumb.php'))
$image = "/scripts/timthumb.php?src=$image&w=593&h=225&zc=1";
?>

And in both home.php (if using original Unstandard) and index.php, replace this:

< ?php $image = get_post_meta($post->ID, ’secondary_image’, true); ?>

with this:

< ?php if (get_post_meta($post->ID, ’secondary_image’, true))
$image = get_post_meta($post->ID, ’secondary_image’, true);
elseif (get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘lead_image’, true))
$image = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘lead_image’, true);
else
$image = 0;
?>
< ?php
if ((! $image) || (! file_exists(".$image")))
$image = "/images/secondary-default.jpg";
?>
< ?php if (file_exists('./scripts/timthumb.php'))
$image = "/scripts/timthumb.php?src=$image&w=293&h=150&zc=1";
?>


For proper XHTML, the “&” characters above should be “& a m p ;” without the spaces and without the quotes. That’s the way I wrote it, but the HTML is being interpreted.

And of course, you need to upload /images/lead-default.jpg and /images/secondary-default.jpg images. Read the timthumb documentation for how to set up fast caching.

I just tried to install the wp-table plugin. When I went to activate it I got this message:

Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.

Did you encounter that issue?

I did encounter that fatal error when activating wp-table. If you read the wp-table plugin website, you’ll find some who fixed the problem by uninstalling some plugins, then installing wp-table, then reinstalling the other plugins. I think I simply uninstalled and reinstalled wp-table, without uninstalling the rest. Anyway, I have only used Wordpress 2.6 and 2.6.1, so wp-table can definitely be made to work there. Perhaps I will write some code that will make the category footer without using wp-table, but for now, I don’t have much motivation, since wp-table works for me and I rarely add new categories.

Great tweaks, and thanks for sharing your ideas here. I followed your example and used only the lead images on the front page of my site, I think it looks much cleaner.

Any progress on using the secondary images on your sidebar? I’ve tried to do it on my site (replacing the “Most Recent” text) but can’t get it exactly right. Either the title or comment header goes missing (or the comments on the page altogether.) If you’re attempting the same thing, would love to exchange ideas with you!

In case you were interested (just assumed that you might be given your comment to Guga above), this is what finally worked for me:

<?php query_posts(’showposts=3′); ?>
<?php while(have_posts()) : the_post(); if(!($first_post == $post->ID)) : ?>
<div class=”post” id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>”>
<div class=”secondary-post-bg”>
<p class=”post-comments”><?php comments_popup_link(’No Comments’, ‘1 Comment’, ‘% Comments’); ?></p>
<?php $image = get_post_meta($post->ID, ’secondary_image’, true); ?>
<a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” title=”<?php the_title(); ?>”><img width=”293″ src=”<?php echo $image; ?>” alt=”" /></a>
<div class=”title-insert”>
<h3><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<?php endif; endwhile; wp_reset_query(); ?>

And then you have to put this <?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); update_post_caches($posts); ?> and <?php endwhile; endif; ?> around the code calling up comments. Also make required amendments to the CSS. Now I just have to figure out how to paginate the home page!

Carson,

see http://wordpress.org/support/topic/164999?replies=1

after question #9 under “Additional Questions”.

You can also look at (or copy) my style.css page:

http://www.galactica-science.com/wp-content/themes/unstandard/style.css