infovore

Thanks. In the end, I wrote my own cap implementation, and moved to Hyper Cache, which despite the slightly weaker documentation I’ve been exceptionally happy with. But thanks for sending me that.

If your newsletter was of a regular format – ie, you send it once a week, and it consists (in part) of a week’s worth of posts stuck into a template – you could generate a page in your theme not for public consumption, as it were; and then all you need is a mailing script/database that, once a week, looks at the php page on the site (generated dynamically) and chucks its content in a mailing to your list.

If you’re wanting to select posts… that could be do-able, too. Your front end pulls entries from the database with checkboxes; and whatever you select creates a new, temporary template. Then the mailing side of things sends the content of that file to your list. Three parts: the front-end, the templating set-up, and the mailing system itself.

Unfortunately, I don’t have enough time to help with this project right now; I’d suggest that as a way of approaching it – thinking of it as a templating wizard with an email engine bolted on. Does that help at all?

The original reason I was experimenting this was trying to use WordPress as a magazine CMS. On the front page, I wanted to pull one, latest article from each category and display it on the index.

Which sounds like it should be an inbuilt thing – pull the latest from each category and display it. It is – it’s just it requires more than one loop. Posts in WordPress, for those of you used to other blogging systems, are requested by a query and looped through. More than one set of criteria for choosing a post on a page == more than one loop necessary.

So, if you wanted your blog to be “every post I’ve made in every category” you’d have a normal loop, but to also show your most recent photo (something you’d categorised as a photo) in a sidebar, you’ll need a second loop. It’s just getting into the mindset: you ask for posts with a criteria, you loop through the result – and you’ll need several requests for several criteria.

Why not a plugin? Exactly what ifelse says. This is *not* rocket science, and it’s something that requires a great deal of flexibility. I can think of writing a plugin to do this, but it’d be awfully inefficient. This is the cleanest, simplest most efficient way of doing it, and, as ifelse points out, it’s not something that needs a plugin – all that functionality is there waiting for you. And, of course, it’s less likely to break than a plugin when the next version’s released.

It’s a design decision. It won’t get “fixed” because that’s the developers’ intent. Posts per page gets propogated through all types of pages, from main to archives which is far more consistent than the “implied all posts” in archives.

Perhaps, ColdForged, perhaps – but removing functionality and then justifying it with “it’s a design decision” just doesn’t cut it. It could be quite easily fixed – the developers leave this functionality as the default but offer an option to return to a) how it works in other blogging engines and b) how it worked in 1.2 .

You can’t justify removing functionality by saying ‘we like it like that’. Well, you can, but it’s a pretty immature product if that’s the case. I hate nothing more than upgrading a piece of software and spending a day installing hacks to restore old functionality.

And hey, I’m a big fan of a lot of the new features in 1.5. It’s stupid little things like this that really irk me about WordPress.

Thanks, ifelse – that’s really useful stuff I couldn’t find last time I looked. If anything, this kind of post will also help Google find stuff better…

This is a pretty major problem, I’d say; looking forward to seeing if it actually gets fixed or not. For now, I shall hack around it, like the rest of us.

I’ll try and explain this later; what you want *is* possible. Essentially, you make a link in text within a div, and set the size of the div to the size of your image. Then, you make the text invisible. As a result, you have a clickable image but the image is a background-image, not in an img tag. And if you’re viewing in text only, it’ll still work fine, as the text stops being hidden there.

Only problem is: your background image is presumably related to the article? It’d be possible, I think, to have the url for the image as a Custom Field, but altering the image is tricky because the path to the image is referenced in the css file which isn’t dynamic.

OK, here’s how I’d do it: include image url as a custom field in the post. Make sure all images are always the same size. Place the image in a div wherin any links are dimensions x *y – this is tricky. Then, your link, image, article are all rendered dynamically, the link size is all that’s in the css.

2 ways:

If you just dump the contents of your theme into index.php at the root of your site (rather than the theme directory) and ignore the fact that themes even exist, as long as your mod_rewrite configuration is all OK, this should work.

Or, alternatively: make a new folder with your current index.php and style.css files in (and rename them that). Stick them into the themes directory. Activate that theme. It will work. You don’t need headers, footers, single page templates – at the very most you just require an index.php and a style.css . Leave the index.php at the root of the site as normal.

The extra functionality the themes provide make it easier to manage more complex weblogs and sites (and indeed, I’ve been using WordPress as more a CMS and less a blogging engine). They are by no means vital or necessary.