WordPress leaving behind blogging?

WordPress after over 5 years of being the perferred blogging tool of choice of professional bloggers and recognized worldwide, hosting over 4.5 Million Blogs on WordPress.com, Automatic the company behind WordPress has announced the Beta of version 3 of their popular Blogging platform will no longer be simply a blogging platform. The new WordPress version 3 sports many new features borrowed from its sister product WordPress-MU. In fact WordPress 3 marks a convergence between the two platforms into one very different and new WordPress we’ve never seen before. The Biggest Difference? Blog posts and Pages and now itemized as new objects that are definable.

Wordpress 3.0

To explain it better, I’ll give you an example: You had Posts and Pages. You could get plugins to make Video blogs and plugins to make galleries. But now, Posts are defined as well as pages as “Types” and new “Types” can be defined. You can make a Post type for Podcasts, Videos, Photos and anything you can imagine. WordPress has grown beyond a blogging platform into a full fledged CMS. No, not wordpress AS a CMS WordPress IS a CMS. With content types definable, you could make a website that had a blog, static pages, videos, (for VLogs) PODcasts, download archives, flash pages, anything you can imagine. This ment a complete overhaul of the Page Navigation system in WordPress, and they sought out the Developers at WooThemes to apply their Page Navigation Editing system to the WP Core, and it looks awesome!

Other tidbits about WordPress 3:

• Specific author templates. The function get_author_template() has been expanded in wp-includes/theme.php.
• Background settings configuration
• Custom Post Types

Some preview screenies for those interested:

WordPress 3 Menu Editor

WP3 Menu Editor

WordPress 3.0 Background settings

Background Editor

WordPress 3.0 Custom Post Types

Custome Post Type Creation

This is a beginners guide to creating a site-wide navigation that is consistent from page to page.

Tired of keeping track of multiple Menu’s on different pages? As your site grows, adding 1 new page to 25 other pages’ navigation can become a full time job. I’ll show you how easy it really is to make a single navigation that will save you time and headaches!

For this you’ll need:

1. Guts
2. A little understanding of HTML CSS and PHP (Not Really)
3. Notepad++ (Or any HTML editor)
4. A copy of DDtabmenu From Dynamic Drive (This file)

1. Let’s start off with the code you’ll need. The Three Parts are:

A. The CSS include, paste this in the header of your html.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/solidblocksmenu.css">

B. The Javascript Magic,  paste this near the top of your html.

<script type="text/javascript" src="/ddtabmenu.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">ddtabmenu.definemenu("ddtabs1", auto)
</script>

To make adjustments, you can change the tab_menu_id to whatever HTML id your using for your menu, and the number after the comma will select which link is highlighted.
SYNTAX: ddtabmenu.definemenu(“tab_menu_id”, integer OR “auto”)
//initialize Tab Menu with ID “ddtabs1″ and select 1st tab by default

C. The HTML for the Links

<div id="ddtabs1" class="basictab">
<ul>
<li><a href="http://green.cx/" rel="sc1">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="http://green.cx/Link1.htm" rel="sc2">Link1</a></li>
<li><a href="http://green.cx/Link2/" rel="sc3">Link2</a></li>
<li><a href="http://green.cx/Link3/">Link3</a></li>
<li><a href="http://green.cx/Link4">Link4</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

D. The HTML for the Subtitles

<DIV class="tabcontainer">

<div id="sc1" class="tabcontent">Sub contents here</div>
<div id="sc2" class="tabcontent">Sub contents here</div>
<div id="sc3" class="tabcontent">Sub contents here</div>

</DIV>

2. Now The Required files you need on your server

Download this file and extract the contents to the root of your webserver, using a FTP client like FileZilla.

And, Volia! You should have a nice HTML/CSS Navigation on your site, but you don’t want to copy/paste this to EVERY page on your site right?
What if you needed to change a link or fix a typo? That would be a LOT of editing for a site with more than a hand full  of pages.

So we get around that using a simple PHP include file.

Woah! Don’t get nervous, this is actually really easy, just keep following along!

Now making that nice flashy menu and making it a PHP include is really quite easy.

First off I feel the need to make it clear, your server needs to support PHP. (Of course)

Start off Coping the HTML code for the MENU and the Subtitles, into a new document, named nav.inc

nav.inc Contents

<div id="ddtabs1">
<ul>
<li><a href="http://green.cx/" rel="sc1">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="http://green.cx/Link1.htm" rel="sc2">Link1</a></li>
<li><a href="http://green.cx/Link2/" rel="sc3">Link2</a></li>
<li><a href="http://green.cx/Link3/">Link3</a></li>
<li><a href="http://green.cx/Link4">Link4</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<DIV>
<div id="sc1">Sub contents here</div>
<div id="sc2">Sub contents here</div>
<div id="sc3">Sub contents here</div>
</DIV>

Now rename your index.html file to index.php

Keep the CSS and Javascript in the header as per usual.

But where the Menu was located, replace it with this code.

<?php
include ("/nav.inc");
?>

That should put the contents of the navigation include file whenever this line is called. But notice! It will only work when the index (or any file on the server) ends with .php

Give it a try!

]]> http://green.cx/web-resources/web-dev-resources/web-20-navigation-crash/feed/ 0