ShishaNites.com has required a new website for a while now, one that incorporates the look and feel of TheShishaShop.com’s site (as it is afterall a spin-off). To make the site easy to update however, it was decided that a simple CMS should be used to easily control the content (using Pages) and blog format for the Latest News section.

With the introduction of the latest version of WordPress (2.1), it is now possible to set any page as the homepage, not to mention 550 bug fixes, it qualifys as the selected package.

So work was underway to work on a new template system. Luckily, the Wordpress template site features a huge amount of freely downloadable pre-made templates. A few where chosen that closly matched the 3 column system required and the editing process had begun.

It was clear at this point however that WordPress uses CSS extensively to layout the site. This has its advantages as well as its disadvantages, especially as the rest of the portal is based around tables, keeping consistency may cause a slight problem… Once this section is complete, it may lead for the rest of the portal to become completely CSS based allowing fo more lighter code, however thats something to persist in in the future.

But what is life without problems? First CSS issue came up within the footerwrap tag, defineing a fixed height was proving to be very difficult within a cross browser environment, i.e. IE (pun intended). Luckily, Google came to the rescue with a link to the Prop-Clear: CSS min-height hack

In normal use, the prop will extend beyond the bottom of the box because floated elements are partially removed from the flow of the document. I say “partially” because there is still a way we can use the floated element to determine how high the enclosing element should be. The way is to add the next part of this hack: something for our prop to push down on. We need the overflow:hidden; style since MSIE refuses to automatically make div tags less than 1em high when in Standards Compatible mode.

View the CSS code block here

Lets see if we bump into any more CSS problems anytime soon, its still early in the theming process

OK a new theme has been installed called Tarski. Is has been modified slightly, more changing and hacking will be done later! While browsing around the Tarski site, a recommended plugins page was found that included a few useful Wordpress Plugins including the Ultimate Tag Warrior.

You may start to notice that each post now has Tags which should increase relevency within search results. You can even go to a page dedicated to tags here that include two very cool functions; The first is called a Tag Cloud, this basically is a scale system that shows how popular the tags on this site are, the darker and bigger the text, the more pages are associated with it on the site. Clicking on any of these tags will display the associated posts. The second feature allows you to search for posts associated with the tags, this also allows you add tags as well to show you a greater pool of results. Take it for a test spin here.

Another plugin that was installed was the Clean Archives Page plugin, this changes the look of the archives pages to include individual dates for each posts made. Click here to view the page now. Im sure you will agree, the page is alot more detailed now.

A plugin called Widgets was also installed, this was made by a company called Automattic.com, its basically something that allows for easier customisation without messing around with HTML coding. It made customising the side panel a lot easier! More information, visit there site here!

Well the sites been crying out for a long time to have a facelift and finally the first step of this process has arrived. A new theme has been installed and will be the foundation of a new look with additional functions that other blogs have. However, with all the other projects going on, its difficult to say just how long this will take to completely implement…

Oops, almost forgot, the theme used is Tarski.

Strangely, Stat Counter had been recently reporting 0 visitors to this site even though other sites across the network are reportedly being directly accessed via VSNetwork.co.uk, something was not right…

Then it clicked, the recent update of WordPress Software had deleted the modded pages that included the code to load the Stat Counter counter code. This has been added and the problem now fixed!

Just noticed here that an update to WordPress has been released with over 50 bugs fixed and some major security issues fixed! If you have a WordPress blog, here over here to download the latest stable release. This is the first time an upgrade has been done but luckily, there were no problems. Anyone else who is upgrading from 2.0.3 to 2.0.4 should follow this guide here.

REMEMBER TO BACKUP YOUR DATABASE FIRST!

A UK user on the 27th July decided to purchase a copy of the video making it a total of three sales for the month, not bad considering the superslow Adwords campaign running on the side to promote it, sad thing is, convert the figure into Pound Sterling and its not a great deal of money…

UnleashMyPSP.com is due a proper makeover very soon once the CDLakorn.com project is complete. Planned features will include an RSS feeds for the latest news, a section on games, PSP hardware and also a section on UMD movies. Naturally, this is about making revenue and a good development project with plenty of traffic so will be based on WordPress technology with an Amazon feed to display the product information and options to buy with. Being related to PSP, ClickBank products and Adsense content will also be present, its about time it paid for it self now!

According to the Wikipedia, Pingback is a method for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles. Some weblog software, such as WordPress, support automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pinged when the article is published. The sites are pinged and are made aware of the links.

Now a TrackBack is virtually the same as a Pingback, i.e is a mechanism for communication between blogs: However, if a blogger writes a new entry commenting on, or referring to, an entry found at another TrackBack supporting blog, then the commenting blogger can notify the other blog with a “TrackBack ping”; the receiving blog will typically display summaries of, and links to, all the comments entries below the original entry (usually displayed as a Comment).

Make sense? No? Well here’s an excellent summary on TrackBacks in Wordpress:

“…Basically, they both allow you to notify other blogs that your post is related to one of theirs. The other blog, if it has trackbacks or pingbacks enabled, will then add a link to your article below their post. Say, for example, you post an article about ducks on your Wordpress blog. You find another blog that has a similar article on ducks and would like them to link back to you. Take their trackback uri (usually available below the post) and place it in the TrackBack a URI blank below your article on the Write Post screen in Wordpress Admin. The other blog will recieve this trackback and (if enabled) will place a link to your article below their article complete with a short excerpt from yours.

To use pingbacks, check allow pings and place links to other articles in your post. Wordpress will scan the post and ping the other links. Those links that have pingbacks enabled will add a simple link to your site below the post you have linked to on their site. Pingbacks are considered more secure than trackbacks as they automatically verify the existance of the pinging site…”

So what should happen is, once this article is posted, the corresponding blogs should recieve TrackBack messages saved as Comments.

For those of you that are interested in the background, the TrackBack specification was created by Six Apart who first implemented it in its Movable Type blogging software in 2002. It has since been implemented in most other blogging tools. Six Apart started a working group in February 2006 to improve the Trackback protocol and have it potentially approved as an internet standard by the IETF. One notable blogging tool that does not support trackback yet is Blogger.

For more Information on TrackBack, visit Six Apart here for a beginners guide.
Another very detailed article on WordPress TrackBacks is located here on the Optiniche.com blog

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