Migrating from Blogger to WordPress without losing anything

By janet | Published: September 4, 2010

I recently decided it was high time to migrate my other blog from Blogger to WordPress. Fortunately, nowadays the first part of this process, moving all your blog entries and comments across, is easy:

  1. Go to your WordPress dashboard
  2. Go toTools–›Import
  3. Select “Blogger ”

You will need to give WordPress permission to access your blogger account, but then it will all be over bar the tidying up. For instance, you might find that once all your posts are imported, you have categories that you would rather have as tags and vice versa. You can use the Tools–›Import–›Categories and Tags Converter to do this very painlessly.

You now have all your blog entries and comments safely in their new home. This is where the fun starts. Assuming you have been blogging for any length of time, you will have search engine rankings based on key words, loyal followers who have links to your blogger blog, links to specific posts from other sites, people subscribing to your RSS feeds. None of this has followed you. Yet. Meaning you stand to lose all this good work and all those relationships. But don’t panic! There is a really easy way of taking all that with you.

First things first – don’t delete your old blog. You are going to use some nifty 301 redirection to pass any traffic from your old blog on to your new blog. If you do a google search on migrating from Blogger to WordPress you will find lots of suggestions of how to achieve this, but I wasted several hours trying several versions before coming across Amit Agarwal’s article on Digital Inspiration.This takes you through 6 easy steps – 7 including redirecting your RSS feed -to achieving a completely lossless migration. The whole process, from importing your posts and comments to completing the RSS feed redirect, should take you less than an hour, and be close to painless. Good luck!

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Adding the index.php (blog) page to the default menu on a thematic childtheme

By janet | Published: September 3, 2010

By default, a thematic childtheme will show all your pages except the standard dynamic index.php. This doesn’t matter if you are using a static home page – you get exactly what you would expect, links to “home”, “blog”, and any other pages you have added.

If, however, you are using the home page to display your blog entries, thematic assumes that it is enough to be able click on the blog title to get you back there if you wander off elsewhere on the site. Sometimes this is fine, but I like to add a link to “home” too, partly because I think it is good practice to have a really obvious way to navigate to the home page of any site, and partly because if you have a really simple blog, with only the blog page and an about page, it looks a little naff to just have one page link…

Fortunately, as with most things, Thematic and WordPress between them make it really easy to do this. Just add the following to your functions.php file:

// I want the home page to appear as a link in thematic_access
// First remove the standard thematic function
function remove_thematic_actions() {
 remove_action('thematic_header','thematic_access',9);
}
add_action('init','remove_thematic_actions');
// Recreate the Thematic Access with home (blog) page included
function childtheme_page_menu() { ?>
 <div id="access">
 <div><a href="#content" title="<?php _e('Skip navigation to the content', 'thematic'); ?>"><?php _e('Skip to content', 'thematic'); ?></a></div>
 <?php wp_page_menu('show_home=1&sort_column=menu_order') ?>
 </div><!-- #access -->
 <?php }

add_action('thematic_header','childtheme_page_menu','9');

For more ways to customise the navigation see the WordPress function reference for wp_page_menu() and the Themeshaper article on WordPress menu tricks

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post_footer customisation

By janet | Published: August 20, 2010

The site I am currently working on is requiring a lot of filtering of the standard Thematic functions. Chris’ ThemeShaper page on filtering is a good place to start, as is his guide to how to use filters, but today I was looking for some direction on how best to customise the post_footer and came across Devin’s thematic filters list, which is more comprehensive than the ones I had previously come across.

However, as ever the ThemeShaper forum came up trumps with a pretty detailed guide to the innards of the thematic_post_footer and how to filter them.

With all this help, it was easy to filter the footer to get rid of everything but the postcomments, and to change this to be of the format ‘Comments (X)’ where X is the number of comments:

// change comments text
function mypostcomments()    {
    if (comments_open())    {
        $postcommentnumber = get_comments_number();
        $postcomments = ' <span class="comments-link"><a href="' . get_permalink();
        $postcomments .= '#comments" title="' . __('Comment on ', 'thematic');
        $postcomments .= the_title_attribute('echo=0') . '">';
        $postcomments .= __('Comments (', 'thematic') . $postcommentnumber . ')</a&amp;rt;</span&amp;rt;';
        return $postcomments;
    }
}// end mypostcomments
add_filter('thematic_postfooter_postcomments','mypostcomments');
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colour me

By janet | Published: August 18, 2010

Choosing colours for a website is one of the most exciting – and the most difficult – aspects of the design process. The choice of colours determines the feel of the site (formal, friendly, wacky…). Not to mention how easy on the eye it is to read the text or find your way around. Using colours consistently to aid navigation, e.g. making all internal links one colour and all external links another, can make a tremendous difference to usability. But if you start off using a colour one way and then suddenly use it in another it can throw people, without them ever realising why.

I recently found a great article by Chris Lake that covers the whole area well, and has links to some great tools. I also found colorschemedesigner.com which I can myself using even more than the excellent paletteman site.

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WordPress publication checklist

By janet | Published: August 10, 2010

I’m still learning about how to manage the workflow surrounding using WordPress to create websites. In a matter of around 3 weeks I’ve become very comfortable with creating Thematic Child Themes for my designs, and with a useful pointer from the ThemeShaper forum I’ve pretty much got my design process sorted now. I use layouts from the Thematic theme library to develop the basic design with my client, using plain old Dreamweaver until the basic design and structure are set. I then create a child theme and develop the site on localhost (there’s a great guide on how to do this). Once I have the site theme working I install it on my development server so that my client can view it. We tweak, we populate with content, we test. And then I publish to the client’s domain.

However.

Being new to this there are a number of things I need to remember to do, preferably in the right order, to make the publication as smooth as possible. So this is my (probably evolving) checklist of what to do.

  1. Use the export tool under (would you believe it) “Tools” to save the current WordPress site on the development server.
  2. If using plugins with the facility to save settings, e.g. I use the Fast and Secure Contact Form plugin, save all these too, it will save lots of hassle.
  3. Install WordPress on the client hosting package.
  4. Install plugins and activate. Where necessary, e.g. for contact form, import settings.
  5. Set the name, description, whether using a static home page, date preferences and permalink preferences.
  6. Don’t forget to set the search engine option. I always hide sites under development ever since a client got a nasty shock when a daft test post appeared as a Google search result, but you really don’t want the live site to be hidden…
  7. Import the site.
  8. Upload the theme (or in my case, Thematic plus my child theme).
  9. Activate the correct theme.
  10. I haven’t tracked down the best way to deal with the annoyance of the “about” page which is always there on a fresh installation, as I usually have an “about” page of my own, but don’t want it ending up being called “about-2”. Currently I cut and paste the “real” page content into the “helpfully provided by WordPress” page and trash the imported page. Hacky but it works until I work out what I should be doing.
  11. Make sure the page order is correct. I use the “My Page Order” plugin.
  12. Set the widgets up correctly. It’s a bit of a shock to see your supposedly lovely site looking all wrong because the search box is appearing where the main page navigation should be…
  13. Check, double check and then check again. Does it look and behave like it should? Is it valid html and css? (I’m assuming all the browser and screen resolution checks have already been done during development.)
  14. I’m assuming I’ve already added in the google analytics code but I need to create a sitemap.
  15. One last check, then contact the client and tell them their brand new shiny WordPress-based site is live and ready for action.
  16. Worry about what I’ve forgotten…
Posted in Developing with Wordpress, Thematic, Wordpress | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

useful hooks for thematic child themes

By janet | Published: August 9, 2010

Jean-Baptiste Jung put together a really helpful list of hooks for use with thematic. They allow you to e.g. change the footer credit or add Google Analytics scripts to your header without altering the template pages. You just add php functions to your functions.php file. If you are new to this concept it is really worth reading Ian Stewart’s tutorial on action hooks in WordPress child themes.

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I’m RDFa-enabled…

By janet | Published: August 9, 2010

I’ve just installed the WordPress RDFa plugin. Apparently all my posts will now be automatically tagged using FOAF and Dublin Core. Over time this may even be useful? With google using RDFa now, and given I used to work with the Semantic Web people at HP (who are now epimorphics) it just felt like the Right Thing To Do. So I’ve done it.

*applause*

Posted in semantic web | Tagged , | 1 Comment

getting organised

By janet | Published: August 9, 2010

I spend a lot of time browsing the web. For fun, for news, to solve problems with code, to learn. I end up bookmarking hundreds of pages, things I think I might want or need to use/read again and want to be able to find easily. But it just doesn’t work. I have umpteen levels of nesting in my bookmarks, and I can never quite find what I am looking for. I usually end up just searching again, and I can waste hours looking for something I vaguely remember seeing a few days ago but that has got lost in my bookmark hell. Even my sock drawer works better than my bookmarks.

So here I am, embarking on my latest adventure as a web designer, using WordPress because a client wanted a website with an integrated blog. But I plumped for WordPress because it offers the possibility that I can give my clients far more control over their own content. Why should they need to contact me to add a line of news on their home page? or when they want to add another link? I know I am potentially doing myself out of what is, lets face it, a very useful source of income here, but it makes sense.

And then light dawned. Worpress is a content management system, not just a blogging tool. In my quest to make my client’s life easier I have learnt a lot about how to display different posts in different places based on what category they are in. So why not use the same thing to attempt to bring a little order to my own life? Why not use posts to “remember” that cool tip on how to control floats? Or to make it easy to find that great article on designing for accessibility?

So that’s what I am going to try to do. Which is why a lot of my blog is going to be notes to myself on why this or that article is really good. Maybe it will be useful to you too, but frankly, this is all about me…

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Why I hate Flash

By janet | Published: August 9, 2010

I hate flash. I admit it. I really hate flash. I hate the way it makes style more important than usability. I hate the way that you have to sit there waiting for it to load. I hate the way it takes control away from the user. The back button gets disabled. Search engines find it hard to “see” what your site is about. It makes things nigh on impossible for those forced to use a screen reader. If you want to make a movie then please, make a movie, don’t turn what should be a set of pages of information into a celebration of your skills as a designer at the expense of the user. Sure, use it as part of a site, to add interest, to animate a banner or a cartoon, to build a game in to your site for a bit of fun. But please, don’t let it take over, don’t use it for the entire thing, don’t force me to sit and wait while your masterpiece loads and then force me to navigate my way round your content in the way you dictate rather than letting me decide where I want to go and what I am interested in. Don’t relegate me to being merely the audience as you demonstrate how clever you are. I’ll just go elsewhere. Above all, don’t make me download plug-ins just for the privilege of exploring your content, its rude.

Other people have put all this much more eloquently and reasonably, check out Jakob Nielsen’s post. It’s perfectly possible to create attractive, even beautiful, websites that don’t break the basic principles of the web, that you separate content from presentation and allow the user to control how they explore that content and even how they see it.

Posted in Design | Tagged , , | 1 Comment