Library Web Chic

Before leaving on vacation and having to deal with Ike, I’d been working on a project to test convert a website to Wordpress as a content management system. During this process a couple of folks really helped me out. So I’d like to acknowledge them and say a big THANKS. Without their help I would have spent quite a bit of time debugging of retracing my steps.

First, John Miedema who created the OpenBook Book Data plugin. I emailed John because I discovered that his plugin broke any other Wordpress plugin that used “shortcodes”. Having looked at the plugin a bit, I figured that John would want to know but wouldn’t be able to fix it very quickly. John was awesome. Not only was he able to replicate the error, but he realized that through talking to me that the solution to the problem was using shortcodes in his plugin. He emailed me corrected versions of the plugin to test. Which I did some of before having to leave and now a new and improved version of the plugin exists which works with other shortcode plugins and the gallery shortcode.

Second, Tom DeForest and his student Jared Havican at BYU. Tom posted to my blog about using Wordpress for events and I emailed back asking if he had template code I could use. His student Jared was able to send me template code which I modified and am using to drive the events portion of my test site. Jared’s code was good but for WPMU and pre-2.6 so there were some table changes I had to account for in the SQL. It was a great starting point though and helped me think through the problem.

I’m really getting psyched about teaching people to use Wordpress as a CMS and although there are some things that aren’t perfect in my test site. It looks pretty darn good. Have a couple more things I want to try out before the preconference but if I don’t get to them no big deal. I’m pretty good to go at this point.