Gaston Garcia

I just switched themes. I had this one kind of ready in Photoshop. It’s based on Blueprint CSS with a custom column and margin width. It’s 1180 pixels wide.

It’s totally not finished. I still have to work on my Flickr Favorites thing on the left, maybe mixing it a little with stuff I enjoy from Youtube or something.

Also the Comments templates are still not looking good, and I have no comments enabled on the home page. I’ll get to this shortly.

But I’m happy to leave Thesis Theme. It’s a great theme, but it wasn’t mine, and I’m used to being able to just look inside and do stuff. It felt weird not to be able to work comfortably in my own blog.

Well I had said that I was moving my blog to EE 2.0. But that won’t be happening anytime soon. ExpressionEngine seems to be lacking an import utility.

Version 1.6 of EE used to at least have an MT (Movable Type) import utility which could be used. But for version 2 EE doesn’t even have that.

So I’m sticking with WordPress. Which is probably the smart thing to do. I see myself telling friends “Use the right tool for the job”, and WordPress is the right tool for blogging.

So that’s that. Gonna make myself a Carrington-Blueprint theme of my own.

Sheesh. I was just about to edit my Thesis WordPress template and found out that it’s got it’s own very special way of handling template files and functions. Not sure I like that. I’m used to working with regular themes or the amazing Carrington Theme Framework.

The desicion

I’m moving this blog to ExpressionEngine. I’ll be using EE 2.0, which just came out about a month ago. I’ve had a personal license for quite some time and I’ve decided to use it and explore what it’s got in store.

Is there something wrong with WordPress?

Absolutely not. I’m 100% sure that it’s the best blogging platform available. It rocks and I love it.

So why ExpressionEngine?

Well I use ExpressionEngine daily at work. About 95% of the sites we do are on EE. I haven’t had the time to play with version 2.0 and I want to get the hang of it.

I love EE’s templating system and I’m looking forward to creating a blog “theme” in EE.

So for now, thank you WordPress. Hello EE.

Most WordPress themes come with their own HTML markup for it’s search form. But sometimes you just don’t know where the hell the code is coming from.

Let’s say you drag the Search widget to your Dynamic Sidebar but want to change the text of the search button. Well here’s what you gotta do:

1. Look for a file in your theme directory called searchform.php
2. If you find it, edit it.
3. If you don’t find it, create a file called searchform.php in your theme directory and paste the following default code:

 <form id="searchform" method="get" action="/index.php">
      <div>
         <input type="text" name="s" id="s" size="15" /><br />
         <input type="submit" value="Search" />
      </div>
     </form>

Now you’re ready to edit your default Search Form.

Using Carrington Jam to create your own theme is the best thing since sliced bread, but it can become a bit daunting at times. It’s easy to get lost.

The little constant called CFCT_DEBUG that you can set inside the “funcions.php” file in Carrington can really save your ass. It defines whether you want to show the file paths of all files being called in your theme.

So when you want to see the order in which files are being called in your theme just set CFT_DEBUG to true. Once you find your way back just re-set it to false.

Carrington Core has been updated to version 2.5 and fixes a couple of bugs. Check out the announcement.

WordPress is a world of plugins. I come from developing sites in Expression Engine and therefore I’m used to hand coding a lot of stuff. But in WordPress plugins is the way to go. From embedding .swf movies to writing some custom inline JavaScript in a bog post —everything is done by plugins.

So this post will be where I collect the list of plugins I’m finding useful along the way. It will change and grow. I hope it’s useful for others too.

Contact Forms

Contact Form 7 is the best contact form plugin I’ve encountered in WordPress. It has literally tons of options ranging from validation, captchas, Ajax submit, multiple contact forms, etc.

Image compression and optimization

I’m a big fan of Smush.it, a free image optimization service provided by a couple of great guys from Yahoo. Now there’s WP-Smush.it. A plugin that optimizes your images as you upload them to your blog. This is a biggie. (thx www.danielgavilan.com for the tip)

Embedding Flash in blog posts and pages:

Kimili Flash Embed is the best plugin for embedding swf files in WordPress. The syntax for getting a movie embedded is very straightforward and easy to understand. It supports the passing of Flashvars and Parameters to your movie easily. You also get a shiny little Flash button in your visual editor to make things even easier.

Syntax highlighting for code examples:

WP-Syntax has support for tons of languages and simply works. Everyone uses it and so should you.

Font Replacement

WP-Cufon is the lastest and greatest. It’s based on the new technique for font replacement called Cufon which is an alternative to sIFR. It’s easy to install, automatically recognizes the fonts you generate and upload to your website and has a preferences page to get the little details all set up.

Inline Javascript

I know that writing inline Javascript is a crappy practice. But you might need it from time to time. This plugin won’t blow your mind, but hey, it’s worked for me when I’ve needed it. Volcano Inline JS.

Embedding YouTube Videos

Smart YouTube. This plugin rocks. It has options for embedding different quality versions of a video and has support for HQ. It allows you to set some default sizes for your blog posts and sidebar videos. Get it.