Themes and Plugins

I spent the evening installing and activating the plug-ins I plan to use on the new site. Mostly the same one’s I’m currently using, until better come along, however, since I won’t be using one of the advanced templates which automatically use several plug-ins, like Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW), I had to develop the pages to take advantage of them myself. Not too difficult, as long as the documentation is sufficient, and that for UTW is fairly extensive, and nicely linked from the admin panel. It took me a bit to get the hang of editing pages based on templates though. The pages that use templates are a type of ‘place holder’ and don’t necessarily contain any content themselves. They only give a name and URL path to the template to be called. That was a tricky thing to get used to!

I did run across two plug-ins that seem incompatible with the newer version of WordPress (2.1.3), that I have on my development server. I will investigate the details on these tomorrow to confirm it is a problem, and see if there are updates, or if I can fix it. I was able to do that with a problem I found with the Technorati Rank plug-in I found the other day, and reported to the author. The two plug-ins I was having problem with, Brians’s Latest Comments (1.5.8) and Smart Update Pinger (2.0) both caused the plugin-page to not display properly when enabled. I will investigate, and report what I find.

I had hoped to launch the new design tonight, but I have a bit more work to do. It will be another day or two before it is complete. But, it is coming along nicely. I basically have to apply the design elements that I have done for the primary template page, to the other specialty pages. I also still have to convert the tab navigation to a cross-browser supported CSS technique.