Technical Tidbits™

Well, what do you think?

I half expected an announcement, but I was pleasantly surprised when I opened my Artisteer (#1 WordPress Theme Generator. Instantly create great looking and professional WordPress Themes).* software to find an update available.  They are now supporting WordPress 3.0! YEA!

I haven’t looked at it yet, but I’m sure it will be fantastic.

Our blog layout was designed using Artisteer software (as well as many custom designs for our clients) and I was so disappointed when they didn’t immediately support WP 3.0.  I upgraded my clients but I couldn’t update their theme to take full advantage of the new features in 3.0.

But alas, this is not a problem now!

I will be using the new Artisteer (#1 WordPress Theme Generator. Instantly create great looking and professional WordPress Themes).* today and I will let you know how well it works.  And, you’ll know it’s working well when you see our theme upgraded too! I’m so excited! (I know, it doesn’t take much!)

Oh, and I was so happy to see the new support, that I even upgraded my version of the software so I’m now able to design for Joomla, Drupal, DotNetNuke, and Blogger! Sweet!

*TIIM: The links in this post and on the right side of this blog are affiliate links. I so believe in this software (because I personally use it!) that I’ve joined the affiliate program!

Over the weekend, I finally figured out how to make the WordPress Home button go to the MICE Home page and not the default home of the blog – as it’s programmed to do!

The Home button code is your Funtions.php page. You can access it from your editor or edit the page in your favorite text editing software.

The new TwentyTen theme explains that you need to edit the arguments to change the Home URL in a template.

/** * Get our wp_nav_menu() fallback, wp_page_menu(), to show a home link. * * To override this in a child theme, remove the filter and optionally add * your own function tied to the wp_page_menu_args filter hook. * * @since Twenty Ten 1.0 */ function twentyten_page_menu_args( $args ) { $args['show_home'] = true; return $args; } add_filter( 'wp_page_menu_args', 'twentyten_page_menu_args' );

Since I’m not using the Twenty Ten template, editing my Web Design Generator – Artisteer produced template was a bit different. Artisteer bases its templates on the old Kubrick template.

The code I had to change was this one:

function art_menu_items()
{
global $artThemeSettings;
if (true === $artThemeSettings['menu.showHome'] && 'page' != get_option('show_on_front'))
echo ' <li>'.$artThemeSettings['menu.topItemBegin'] . $artThemeSettings['menu.homeCaption'] . $artThemeSettings['menu.topItemEnd'] . '&th;/li>
'; add_action('get_pages', 'art_header_page_list_filter');
add_action('wp_list_pages', 'art_list_pages_filter'); wp_list_pages('title_li=');
remove_action('wp_list_pages', 'art_list_pages_filter'); remove_action('get_pages', 'art_header_page_list_filter');
}

After remembering that the word “echo” means to print it to the screen in programming, I caught the first list item tag and pasted over my own URL. Like this:

echo ' <li>&th;a href="http://mice.org">'.$artThemeSettings['menu.topItemBegin'] . $artThemeSettings['menu.homeCaption'] . $artThemeSettings['menu.topItemEnd'] . '

You have to make sure that you get the apostrophe (‘) before the list item (li) and then the apostrophe after the end of your a href tag. Otherwise, you’ll get an error that it cannot parse the line because it’s missing the “,” or “;” – which is really a misnomer.

Hope this helps! If you need to know how to change the Twenty Ten template, let me know by leaving a comment!