cre8d design

It’s a common request: to have a site with both a blog and forums. There’s a number of ways to approach this:

Install blogging software in one folder, install forum software in another.

You get the best of both pieces of software and all the functionality, yet each needs to be themed so that the site looks like it fits together – each in its own way. Visitors usually have to register for the forum and enter in their details to post a comment in the blog section – not the ideal for usability. If you want to “promote” a forum topic to the home page of your blog, you’ll have to re-post it, generating two places for conversations to occur (unless you turn off comments in the blog). There’s not only often a lack of visual similarities, there’s two different systems for your visitors to learn, and real separation of the content (basic useful information such as merged latest comments are difficult to create). You also have two lots of software to upgrade and maintain. If you change your site’s design, you’ll have to change it in two places.

Hack blog and forum software so they work together

Force the software to use the same login, user and permission information. This can work, although it’s messy and upgrading can be a nightmare. You’ll still have two lots of software to upgrade and maintain. If you change your site’s design, you’ll have to change it in two places (unless you’ve hacked this as well – but that’s highly unlikely given the different templating systems used).

Install software which has both blog and forum functionality.

We’ve used Drupal (wonderful) and XOOPS (not so great). For more solutions, search at CMS Matrix (tick Blog and Discussion Forum features). Drupal is brilliant in that you can categorise blog and forum content using the same taxonomy if you like, there’s RSS feeds for taxomony terms, or forums, or blogs – whatever takes your fancy. You can also promote stories from the forums into the blog – and comments are all kept together. One user system for both, one theme, one lot of software to maintain. Drupal is a lot more flexible than Wordpress but has a steeper learning curve at the beginning.

If you’ve already got a successful blog, the thought of moving platforms in order to accomodate forums can be off-putting.

But wait! Are blogs and forums really that different?
Well… yes and no.

While the appearance (think template), functionality (think format/plugins) and usage are different (see Lee’s insightful article on the difference between blogs and forums), the basic underlying content structure is exactly the same:

Blogs are full of posts and comments, created by authors, organised into categories.
Forums are full of topics and comments created by members, organised into different sub-forums.

They fill different roles and exist side-by-side on sites – indeed we would not want to remove either tool from the community sites we run.

This leads me back to my initial thought: if blogs and forums are made up of the same content underneath, could two different templates be created for a site running on blog software – one for the traditional “blog view” and one for the traditional “forum view”? We would then be back to having one piece of software to maintain, one theme, one user and permissions system.

Wordpress’ permissions system is flexible enough to allow users to add forum topics (blog entries), categorise them and have them displayed in a separate area of the site. A template would handle the display and sorting (by last comment date, rather than by last post date). Note-worthy forum topics could be “promoted” to the home page of the site with meta-tags that only users with a certain permission level (e.g. the blog’s owner) could access.

Of course, some features of forums would not be automatically built in and would need to be made available by way of plugins (e.g. if you wanted threaded comments, you’d grab the plugin discussed recently). User profile pages would substitute in for forum member pages.

On the other hand, many forum software systems are bloated with features which can be daunting for new users and full of heavy-to-load pages. Vanilla is an obvious exception – but have a closer look… how different is that from a blog… really?

Once again, would appreciate your thoughts!

Again, here’s a basic “forum view” of my blog.

This tutorial will explain how to change or hide the display of Trackbacks/Pingbacks in Wordpress. You can see an example of this.

This post follows on from my nicer trackbacks plugin and post on improving comment section readability.

1. Open your Comments Template and look for the sort of code below (yours may look different, depending on your theme). I’ll refer to this code as the display code.

   <li class="<?php echo $oddcomment; ?>" id="comment- <?php comment_ID() ?>">
<cite><?php comment_author_link() ?> Says:
<?php if ($comment->comment_approved == '0') : ?>
<em>Your comment is awaiting moderation.</em>
<?php endif; ?>
<br />
<small class="commentmetadata"><a href="#comment- <?php comment_ID() ?>" title=""<>?php comment_date('F jS, Y') ?> at <?php comment_time() ?></a> <?php edit_comment_link('e','',''); ?></small>
<?php comment_text() ?>
</li>


2. Adjust the code to switch based on whether it’s a real comment.

   <?php if (get_comment_type() == "comment"){ ?>
display code
<?php } ?>


   This will now only show comments on your site. People can still trackback/ping your site (if your permissions allow this) and you’ll receive notification, but they won’t clutter up the comments section.

3. If you want to show Trackbacks/Pingbacks on your site, mixed in with the comments, but in a different style, after the code in Step 2, add:

   <?php else { ?>
display code
<?php } ?>

   Remember that “display code” is replaced with the chunk of code in Step 1. Now, change this second lot of the display code to change the way Trackbacks/Pingbacks appear on your site. I have removed the body of the comment and just shows the link to their post:

   <li class="trackback" id="comment-lt;?php comment_ID() >">Trackback: <?php comment_author_link() ?></li>

   I’ve created a special class for my trackbacks so it can have its own style in the stylesheet (e.g. smaller font, different background color). If you decide to leave in the body of their post, my nicer trackbacks plugin will help get rid of the “[...]” bits if you want them gone.

Coming soon: I’m still working on an efficient way of being able to display your Trackbacks/Pingbacks entirely separately from your comments. One simple way would be to loop through your comments twice, once displaying the comments and the other to display the Trackbacks/Pingbacks. A better solution would be to loop through once and store the Trackbacks/Pingbacks for later display. Unfortunately most of the functions in Wordpress don’t return a variable which can be stored, they echo the results directly…

I was over at Chris Jarvis’ blog today and noticed he’s announced a new book coming out: Blog Design Solutions (pre-orders are available but it’s not out till the 20th of February). Funnily enough, I said to someone last night that I found it strange that no-one had yet put out a book on blog design!

The book is a team effort of Phil Sherry, Andy Budd, Simon Collison, Michael Heilemann (aka binarybonsai), Drew McLellan (aka allinthehead), David Powers, Chris J. Davis and John Oxton (aka joshuaink). See their author bios. I gotta say, if Chris, Andy, Michael and John are working together on a book, it’s gotta be good! (I don’t know the others but I’m sure they’ll be interesting too).

The book’s excerpt was a little off-putting in parts however. Here’s the meat of it: (more…)

One of the most common questions I’m asked is for beginner’s help in creating a new Wordpress theme. There’s a few approaches you could take and I’ll list some of the advantages and disadvantages of each method.

1. Adapt the default theme (Kubrick) – Great if you’re only wanting some basic changes, like putting in a new header. If that’s you, you should check out Kubrickr! I wouldn’t recommend adapting the Kubrickr theme if you’re wanting a completely different design. There’s a tonne of bits and pieces to sort through (e.g. some of the CSS code is in the header file, not in the stylesheet which can confuse beginners) and quite a bit of PHP code to figure out. Urban Giraffe has a tutorial on adapting the default theme to your own custom theme.
2. Adapt another theme – Use something like the theme browser for something that’s similar in layout/content to what you’re after. Again, sometimes the code may be overly complex/simple for what you’re after. Working with someone else’s code can take time to get your head around.
3. Create your own theme from scratch – The most flexible, if you know what you’re doing. Using the Wordpress theme documentation is a good place to start but it can be a little daunting for beginners. If you’re wanting to release your theme publically for others to download and use on their blogs, there’s extra things you’ll need to do as well.

Plenty of starting places.

Coming soon: While one theme certainly won’t be the starting place for all themes, over the next little while I’ll be creating a skeleton Wordpress theme which will be a nice easy place to start your theme’s design from.

In this series of posts, I’ll step you through I created the theme and show you how you can quickly adapt the theme to suit your own purposes.