Warning: intense WordPress geekery ahead
The headline above will mean nothing to most readers. But there will be a little niche of WordPress nerds for whom it will cause a tiny thrill of excitement.
Anyone who has made it to the footer of one of these posts will have seen that I am using the popular Pressrow theme created by the prolific and talented Chris Pearson.
But I plan to move this blog over to self-hosted WordPress – and Pressrow isn’t available in the suite of themes (or designs) that’s on offer over at WordPress.org. Curses.
No! There it was on the web ready for download. Fantastic.
Only problem (and here we’re getting really geeky): it was written in 2006 and so wasn’t compatible with WordPress Widgets. They’re the bits and pieces in the sidebar that show you the most popular posts and recent comments.
So I spent a happy evening copying and pasting PHP code from a WordPress tutorial to try to make the theme work. And broke it. No sidebar, no back-end admin area. Sometimes no front page at all. It was, in web parlance, an epic fail.
Until – a breakthrough. Thanks to “28-year-old Sydney-based slacker Dan” for creating a three-column version (which I actually prefer). And thanks also to The Blog Herald for an excellent tutorial on fixing the sidebars so they run WordPress widgets that actually works.
End result – a working three-column development blog, running widget-ready Pressrow. Now all I have to do is run the columns each side of the main post instead of both on the right and play around with the CSS.
This, of course, doesn’t really make me a coding genius. More like a small child banging rocks together randomly and then being astounded at making fire. But still.
And when it’s all sorted out and the updated Pressrow theme is finished, I’ll post it on the blog so any Pressrow fan who fancies it can download it. It’ll sort of be my bid for a tiny slice of internet immortality. Sadly.
Freelance Unbound 