Back and Forth | The Incoherent Ramblings of Designer and Musician Justin Winslow

Revision: Removing Complexity

This is the first in a series of articles documenting the redesign process that resulted in “Revision”, the name designated for the design of this site.

WordPress is an incredibly powerful content management tool. The amount of features seamlessly included in the software is impressive, but the users ability to manipulate those features at will is what makes the package appealing to me.

The previous design used for Back and Forth was the Say It theme. As I have mentioned before, that particular design was built to be distributed to the average blogger for use on their site and, as such, a lot of things needed to be taken into account. Every feature must be available to be included in the presentation and styled accordingly in order to satisfy the requirements of a wide range of customers.

When I decided it was time (or, more accurately, when proper time and motivation presented itself) to create a new design for this blog, I was able to focus on creating a layout that very specifically suited my needs and more importantly the needs of my readers. The objective for users of this site is simple: read the articles. So, and this may be over-simplifying, anything that adds complexity to that task should be removed.

So, what didn’t make the cut?

Read the rest of this entry »

The Grand Unveiling!

A redesign two (2) years in the making has finally arrived. As you may have noticed, I have retired the wonderful Say It 2 theme that I had been using for quite some time. ‘Say It’ was a theme I developed for distribution and, as such, never really suited my needs.

The original notion was to leave it as the theme for Back and Forth for a short period to promote it’s release and grant me time for a proper redesign. Two months turned into two years as life and other activities took over. This weekend I decided it was finally time to give my blog the layout it deserved.

It is now approaching 3 a.m. and my marathon of design must come to a pause. A more robust write-up will follow probably sometime this week.

How to ACTUALLY get widgets working…

Installing/Updating WordPress

If you are having trouble installing widgets (and there is a good chance you are because the online documentation is limited and inaccurate) here’s a brief explanation to get you through this interesting process. First of all, you will need WordPress 2.1 which you can find here. Next you will need the most up to date (presumably) version of the widgets plugin which can be found here. Extract the zip files to somewhere you will easily find them again and upgrade your WordPress software with the upgrade.php file which is explained in the readme file in the WordPress 2.1 folder that you just extracted.

Installing the Widgets plug-in

Now drag the widgets folder you just extracted to your /wp-content/plugins folder. Now go into your administration panel (dashboard) click plugins and click on activate for the widgets plug-in. Then go to your ‘Presentation’ tab click widgets and try to drag your widgets to the box. If it worked, hooray for you, you can go take a brief nap with the time you saved. If your like me and your widgets wont drag or you are having any other issue, then sadly you must continue reading.

Fixing what’s broke

Look in your /wp-includes folder you should see a folder named ‘scriptaculous’. If it’s missing, download this zip file and extract the contents and put the scriptaculous folder into the previously mentioned directory.

Now go into your /wp-includes/js directory and see if there is a scriptaculous folder here. If not, download this zip file and put this scriptaculous folder in there.
*NOTE: these are 2 different folders named the same thing don’t just copy one and put it in both places or your widgets WONT WORK*

Finally, in the /wp-content/plugins/widgets folder open the widgets.php file and find this line of code (line 203):
wp_enqueue_script( 'scriptaculous-dragdrop' );

and add this line right below it:
wp_enqueue_script( 'scriptaculous-effects' );

If you don’t feel like doing that, you can download yet another file here called widgetsPHP.zip and drag the contents of the zip folder (widgets.php) to your widgets folder and click overwrite when prompted.

If it still doesn’t work than you likely didn’t follow the directions laid out here (and from WordPress for the installation/upgrade) exactly. Try again and hope for the best.
Good luck,
-Justin

Say It 2: Electric Boogaloo

‘Say It’ 2.0 implements features originally left out of the original, specifically a dynamic color chooser. It is also very light weight due to a restructuring of the way the design works. If you are currently using the original ‘Say It’ there’s no need to upgrade but some of the new features are really cool. This theme will also remain the theme for Back and Forth as we prepare for an upgrade and redesign in the near future.

Download (.zip 57kb)

-Justin