Indianapolis Web Design Blog » Programming http://www.ianlabs.com The adventures of a freelance web designer Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:06:46 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Templating for WordPress http://www.ianlabs.com/2007/02/21/templating-for-wordpress/ http://www.ianlabs.com/2007/02/21/templating-for-wordpress/#comments Wed, 21 Feb 2007 14:58:32 +0000 Ian http://www.ianlabs.com/2007/02/21/templating-for-wordpress/ I’m sure everyone is wondering why a web designer is using the default WordPress template. Well, I have to admit that I’m no programmer and when I get beyond xhtml/css into the land of php things get a little complicated. I’ve poked around in the default template quite a bit, and even got up the courage to try and convert another template to WordPress, but it was tougher than it seemed at first and I set it aside for the time being. What happens is that i get to the point where I need to modify, remove, or change a line of php and then all hell breaks loose.

More internet searching is in order. If anyone knows about some good (basic) tutorials for this sort of thing, I’d love to hear about them.

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]]> http://www.ianlabs.com/2007/02/21/templating-for-wordpress/feed/ 8 My Very First Php Experience http://www.ianlabs.com/2007/02/09/my-very-first-php-experience/ http://www.ianlabs.com/2007/02/09/my-very-first-php-experience/#comments Fri, 09 Feb 2007 19:23:19 +0000 Ian http://www.ianlabs.com/2007/02/09/my-very-first-php-experience/ Today I had my very first php experience, where I created something from scratch instead of modifying some pre-existing bit of code.

The project was to create a snippet for the Etomite CMS. What I needed for a client was a simple but effective way to play an mp3 in the browser page. Not being a programmer in the very least, I avoided the dreaded actionscripting experience and went online to look for a good quality flash-based mp3 player. Why invent the wheel, right? I found just the thing at SourceForge.net. Some genius there named Fabricio Zuardi created a very nice player.

After taking it and figuring out how to get it to work, I changed the flash embed code to be XHTML compliant and uploaded it for testing. It worked and I was able to change the track simply by altering the display code, so I opened up Notepad++ and proceeded to learn just enough php to do this thing.

After a brief overview at Etomite’s snippet creation documentation, I went online and found a good page about the very (very) basics of php.

I think the toughest part was the syntax. Figuring out how double and single-quotes worked was one particular breakthrough that a php pro might snicker at. I also had a tough time getting my variables to pass and display correctly.

My process was to make the simplest code possible to see how things worked. I would change one character at a time and see the results. Slow and painful, but it worked!

You can see the results here.

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