May. 13, 2008
Moonglove Winnower template is currently live on Roy on Magic.
I made several color and formatting changes since the last update. Relatively easy due to the stylesheet. I also had to scrap the CSS hack for implementing equal height columns, it was causing problems with anchors in the URL. I went with a 1-pixel high background image instead.
Currently most of the PHP logic/heavy lifting is done in sidebar.php while most of the formatting stuff is handled in the stylesheet. Since I’m copying from an existing template and not creating one from scratch, I didn’t actually need to learn much PHP. Most of it was moving code around.
I’m not releasing this source yet because:
- The code is still very messy
- It still doesn’t work properly with Wordpress Widgets
- I still have some improvements I want to make. The search box is missing for instance.
- I’d like to release some variations (featuring other Magic card art) at the same time.
- It’s not yet XHTML-valid. The autocard plugin in particular is causing problems.
Still, the current one is functional enough that I don’t mind using it on the site.
Most of the difficulty so far has been the design part: thinking about colors, how things should be arranged, etc. As an engineer, it’s not one of the things I’m used to doing. I can’t imagine I would be able to do some of the fancy, complicated layouts anytime soon, though I might be able to create simpler, minimalistic ones first.
Posted by Roy in Geeky, Projects, Tech | No Comments
May. 5, 2008
Part 1 of this series is here.
Creating a Wordpress template is harder than I thought. Luckily I’m modifying the default template instead of starting from scratch. The one I’m creating is rather simple but after spending almost 8 hours on it so far, I’m still far away from completing it. I’m guessing the more complicated layouts take more than two weeks of full-time work.
Here’s my current WIP:
Changes since the last part:
Posted by Roy in Projects, Tech | No Comments
Apr. 29, 2008
1. Web design has never been one of my strong points, and it’s something I’d like to improve on.
2. The Roy on Magic blog has been using the default Wordpress Template since forever, and I’ve been trying to find a good WP Template that fits the “Magic the Gathering” theme.
Put the above points together, and I have a new personal project. Just for fun, I’ll log my progress here. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Roy in Projects, Tech | 2 Comments
Feb. 11, 2008
I had been planning to do this for a while: it’s my first Wordpress Plugin! Over at Roy on Magic, I often have to write out decklists and such, so I wanted to have an autocard feature similar to the one used at MTGSalvation. After a quick five-minute search I couldn’t figure out how they did it, so I just wrote the plugin myself. Actual effort was around 3.5 hours, most of it struggling with PHP and Regular Expressions. :p
Details and download are at http://www.roytang.net/wiki/index.php/MTG_Autocard_WP. Hopefully someone else will find it useful.