decisions, decisions….
…in which we circle WordPress like a cat around the stewpot, while our thoughts run on ahead.
As with any tools investigation, it’s great to have a pilot project in mind. In this case we’ve got more than one, which may be a problem:
- Tuning up the static pages’ look and feel in preparation for an overhaul of the wiki and ccHost pages’ CSS
- Porting over to ccHost and relinking the soundfiles from the first two Golden Gate Bridge assays
- Porting over the old gongBlog pages from wikiGong
WordPress seems ideal for (1), now that we’ve learned enough about CSS to do some meaningful tweaking (as opposed to this past year’s experimental hacking). There are some attractive and high-quality themes available at wordpress.org and some decent guides by implementers and third parties. (Hats off to demetris @ http://op111.net/ for advice and tutorials!)
If you’ve found this page, you’re looking at the previews. Tonight we’re using the Basic2Col theme from KKWangen and thinking about whether a simple child theme will be enough. It seems all we’d need to do is add function hooks to the ccHost sample set, and the layout is economical with a far more sophisticated typographic sense than we possess (In the end, it’s about what you love…).
(2) is just some work we need to do anyway. In some ways that’s the ideal project, one that can benefit from unique features of the new tool but doesn’t really demand them. One learns by doing. Meanwhile, useful work gets done.
(3) looks like a potential rat-hole. There are ways to get WordPress to co-exist within a RapidWeaver site–e.g., the WP-Blog RapidWeaver plug-in from Roger Törnström–and then there’s import. There’s no readily-available tool to convert RW to WP, and we’re not ready to break stride and write one. It’s been suggested that an RSS feed from an RW blog can be imported to WordPress, which is probably as technically deep as we’re ready to go on a weekend basis.
We’ll post more here as the work progresses, and you can see how it all works out.
