Playing Around with the Site

You may have noticed some unexpected entries in the RSS feed if you are subscribed to my blog’s feed. As you might have already noticed, I have been making changes in the structure of the blog. I have been trying to turn the blog into more of a personal web site managed by Wordpress. I am feeling like the structure and design is complete and I am slowly filling in the content.

I started filling in the Publications page. I structured it so that posts that I categorize as “Publications” are shown on that page rather than the main blog page. I managed to do that but forgot about the RSS feed. For this reason, yesterday some publication posts appeared in the RSS feed. Tonight, I searched for a way to exclude a category from the RSS and came across a solution in the Wordpress support pages. If you ever need to exclude a category from the RSS feed of your Wordpress blog, you can add the following code into your wp-rss2.php file:

1 if (empty($wp)) {
2    $cat = -11;
3    require_once('wp-config.php');
4    wp('feed=rss2');
5 }

The only part of the code that I had to add was the $cat = -11 part since the other part of the code was already there.

I also noticed that even the publication posts were not appearing on the main blog page, they were appearing on the sidebar where I use get_archives tag of Wordpress. Turns out that tag does not have an argument to exclude a certain category. I used the following code to exclude a category in sidebar recent posts section:

1 php $temp_query = $wp_query; query_posts('showposts=9&cat=-11'); ?>
2 php while (have_posts()) { the_post(); ?>
3 <li><a href="" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to ??">php the_title(); ?>a>li>
4 php } $wp_query = $temp_query; ?>

As I said, I changed the blog into a website and let Wordpress manage it with its blogging and static pages capabilities. I was hunting for a design which would make the site uniform and I guess I settled on Nautica 05 template from Studio7Designs since there was a Wordpress theme based on that template. At the moment, I like how the site looks and I will concentrate on the content rather than the looks.

An important modification that had to be done to use Wordpress as a content management system was to be able to show a home page other than the main blog page. For this purpose, first, I set the blog url to be the root of my domain and kept the wordpress installation on the separate directory from the options page. Then, I found the Filosofo Home-Page Control plugin which enables setting any page to show as the home page. However, more important than that it let’s the user to set a virtual sub-directory for the blog entries. This way, I am able to separate static pages from the blog entries and I am able to keep my search engine rank since I can keep the same permalink structure.

Well, that is about it. Feel free to wander around the site as I am filling in more content.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, cms, filosofo home page control plugin, open source template, Studio7designs, nautica 05

[tags] housekeeping, wordpress, design[/tags]