the anti experience of Ed

… so back in the day, all of 2ish years ago, I first set up my website to use Wordpress as a content management system / blog. I used Wordpress pages to describe myself and my previous digital art work and describe myself, and not have to create an HTML template and use Dreamweaver to manually create new pages as I created new work (duh… a content management system). I then, on the same page, blogged about whatever I fancied. It worked, but in the end it was much more like a blog, as opposed to a website, and as I’m refocusing my web presence to sell myself and my percolating software projects, I knew this wasn’t going to fly.

So, back to the drawing board. I knew I wanted a development journal to blog my progress on my projects, and a side of the website purely dedicated to that journal and descriptions of my past and current projects. I wanted to keep it separate from my personal side, so that someone who wanted to read about my video tracking software progress wouldn’t have to dig through posts about what I think about the Simpsons video arcade game.

First things first, I needed to map out the site so I could easily keep track of what’s done and what needed to be done, as well as provide myself a conceptual map for what I wanted to do. And this was a fantastic excuse to finally pickup a copy of Omnigraffle. You know, the developers are literally next door to what I live. Wacky!

~!

It’s an amazing app, and I’ve begun to use it for mind mapping and interaction design-ing my latest art project. More on that in the future.

Here’s what I ended up with. I know, simple in the end, but still oh-so-useful and sanity-saving.

Website map, in hand, I began to get down to work on the actual site. I first found a theme which I thought would be a great foundation visually for what I wanted to do (which isn’t very much) - Cutline, which I’m very happily linking to on the bottom of every page and post on my site. It’s clean and inoffensive and is a great place to leap up and out from design wise.

Next step - I wanted to have my sidebar dynamically change depending where you were on the website. For example, if the user were on the software oriented side, I wanted her to only see software related content only.

Luckily, Wordpress lets you do that via some pretty simple programming (although I hit some snags which I’ll document as I continue describing what I did). Basically, in the sidebar.php page, you can go (in pseudocode):

if the user is looking at a page describing my software then......
- show the other software pages on the sidebar, categorized by type of software

if the user is looking at the development journal then.....
- only show the last ten posts from the development journal on the sidebar


.. and so on and so forth.

So what I needed to do was to figure out first was how to categorize software related pages properly so that they could be distinguished from other content. I ended up using the “Custom Fields” functionality in wordpress. Basically it lets you create your own metadata to add whatever information you want about your post or page. The “key” is the custom field you want to define, the “value” is the, uh, value of that custom field.

So on my software pages I created a “type” key and for my digital art pages, I typed in “digitalartinfo.” The pseudocode now looks like


if the user is looking at a page describing my software then......
- show pages on my sidebar if they are of "type" "digitalartinfo"


Wait! Ooops. Wordpress doesn’t let you test for metadata types, from what I understand. But you can test if you’re looking at a particular page by number or title, and you can use the boolean “||” to indicate an “AND” in an “if” statement, so what I ended up doing, and it’s a horrible hack that I’m going to investigate fixing later, is


if the user is looking at one of these particular pages that I'm listing manually ......
- show the pages on my sidebar that are of "type" "digitalartinfo"


or in reality, in my sidebar.php, it looks something like this right now:

< ?php if (is_page('14') || is_page('15') || is_page('16') || is_page('17') || is_page('19') || is_page('8') || is_page('3') || is_page('13') || is_page('10') || is_page('11') || is_page('software-and-digital-art-projects') ){ ?>
<ul>
< ?php wp_list_pages('title_li=&meta_key=type&meta_value=digitalartinfo'); ?>
</ul>
< ?php } ?>

(You probably shouldn’t copy and paste this code, by the way. It’s just a snippet for discussion purposes.)

So, well, that’s how it’s working right now for the individual “page” pages. Stay tuned for how I got my index pages working for each section of my site……!