From all the classes I’ve taken in college, Mike Scott and Don Batory are two of my favorite professors. Aside of being well-prepared for lectures and such, the small details really do matter. The favicons on their websites for CS 307 and CS 378 are fantastic. Whenever I’m scrounging through my bookmarks or just looking among a dozen open tabs, having a quickly recognizable image helps me find just what I’m looking for right away.

A few years ago, I had fun using Gimp for one of the first times in creating the favicon for Chavez360. It was just a smiley face with a red headband. The favicon was very simple, but it symbolized something easily recognizable to any Chavez fan.

This blog is a whole different story, though. Even after almost a year of occasional posts, I don’t have a main focus so a true symbol is out of the question. However, after putting it off for so long, I had to come up with something. Fortunately, I have a short word in the title and used a online favicon generator to come up with something reasonable. Then not knowing what else to put in all the blank space left over, I added in some symmetrical symbols. Adding it to WordPress was simple.

No, it’s not the best favicon in the world, but it sure beats the default icon that Firefox provides so now when I visit, it feels just a little more like home.

Quite a while back, I wanted to make a quiz site with questions about PHP, and as I’m still into learning more about WordPress, the only logical thing to do is to develop a plugin that will make WordPress into the perfect CMS for this project.

At this moment, there are 5,855 plugins in the WordPress plugin directory. If so many other people have done it, surely it can’t be too hard, right? But I spent countless hours reading the documentation months ago and never had anything to show for it….

Well, this time I’m going agile. I wrote a post asking “What is 2 + 2?”, added a custom field called “correct” with the value 4, and now have the code to make that answer appear underneath the blog entry. It took me a while to figure out that I needed to pass $content to my function to keep the post from disappearing, but it looks like I’m on my way.


add_action( 'the_content', 'the_pop_quiz' );
function the_pop_quiz($content) {
echo $content;
$flif_pid = get_the_ID();
$pop_quiz_answer = get_post_meta( $flif_pid, 'correct', true );
echo $pop_quiz_answer;
}


Whoa! Two and a half months since my last blog, but bbPress 1.0 just came out recently and I updated the Chavez360 project with this and WordPress 2.8.1, and I finally have a site that integrates as smoothly as I’d like. The only really important suggestion for anybody about to set this up is to install WordPress completely first, including the new bbPress plugin before going on to the bbPress installation. The process would have been a tad smoother for me if only I had thought to do that.

In the past few days, I’ve received about 25 emails from my blog to moderate spam comments–all obviously from the same idiot spambot. So I can understand now why the default option is set to send email notifications to the blog administrator. Even if the comments aren’t posted without moderation (by default), that administrator still needs to know what is going on to find some other method to keep these spam comments from getting in their way.

Since Akismet (I can never spell that right) is built into WordPress, the first thing I did was to activate it and see how that worked. Fortunately, on the Akismet configuration page is an option to “Automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month.” That’s wonderful! The post that that bot keeps trying to comment on is over two months old. Why didn’t they make this option more obvious so I could’ve signed up sooner? Well, I can’t really complain. I just have to sit back now and make sure this works….

Update: it works! So many spam comments caught. Akismet, I love you!

My pet project has undergone many changes in the past several years. What started as a 20 pages of HTML on a free webhost in early 2005 has developed into over 150 pages of content with a news blog, forum, and gallery. Back in 2005, though, I had a lot of free time on my hands. For a while, there was even a wiki for my content. That had been my original idea behind using Chavez360 as the site name: if you followed links around the site, eventually you’d link back to where you started from. But that seemed to be kind of overdoing it, and at the time I couldn’t figure out how to integrate the wiki membership with the rest of my site.

What I had just wasn’t working as planned. As I learned more about webdevelopment and coding, I more and more wanted to create a new CMS and forum from scratch so I could have exactly what I wanted. Unfortunately, it was a needlessly complex task, and it took well over a year before I realized that I wasn’t going to create anything that I’d be satisfied with anytime soon. So I started looking around. There were big CMS’s, blog software, forum software, all in several languages and with a huge variety of features available. How to decide which was the best for me? I wanted something:

1. simple–something that wasn’t already bloated with features that probably would never get used and something where I would at least understand most of the source code. This was probably the strongest factor in my choosing bbPress. By default, it has only the most basic functionality, and anything else can be easily added to taste with plugins.
2. clean–not just the code, but the actually look and feel of the forum pages. It’s easier to find what you’re looking for quickly when it’s neatly organized and not cluttered with lots of unnecessaries.
3. with a community–okay, so maybe the bbPress community isn’t that large, but the WordPress community definitely is. Between the bbPress forums and the WordPress codex, I can find anything I’m looking for.
4. fresh–not so old that everything you could possibly do with it has already been done. I’m looking forward to making a couple of plugins available for others to use… eventually.

It may be weird to choose bbPress first and then WordPress also for consistency, but so far, so good.

After many months of planning and procrastination, I finally used Spring Break to move my site from plain php for content and SMF for the forum to WordPress with bbPress. As much effort as it took, I have to say that either it was much easier than other conversions and integrations I’ve experimented with or the experience from those previous experiments has really paid off.

For the most part, I followed affacat’s instructions on his successful convert from SMF to bbPress, trying it out first on my own machine of course before ready to go live:

1. Install bbPress 0.9.0.4 and WordPress 2.7.1. I chose to put bbPress in a subdirectory of WordPress. Set up the database integration as part of the bbPress installation and delete any posts created on install.
2. Install the latest phpBB with the necessary converter to move my existing members and posts to bbPress.
3. Install Jaim’s phpBB to bbPress converter. I had to change bb_users to wp_users, and delete the first user and forum from the SQL because there are already a first user and forum in bbPress. I’m not sure what the topic_resolved key was from, so I removed that option. Then I copied and pasted the code from bbPress into this tool to generate my topic and username slugs. (There may have been other changes also that I didn’t keep track of.)
4. Finally, I imported the SQL into my database.
5. Install and activate SuperAnn’s WordPress plugin for WordPress / bbPress cookie integration.
6. Activate other plugins.
7. Post the first blog entry and new forum thread to announce the updates.

Man, it feels good to finally have the base I need to build up my site.

I heard that once and can’t quite remember where, but I agree. There’s so much going on in the webdev world. Right now IE8 is in beta. People are arguing over whether HTML5 or XHTML2 is our future. More and more people are accessing websites from mobile devices rather than traditional computers. We check our feed readers to get the news instead of going to various sites. And there’s more and more focus on social media.

And even with all these new things that I have to constantly keep up with, I keep finding out about new things that have really been around forever. Up until about a year ago, I didn’t even know you could use Linux instead of Windows. That’s why I decided to go back to college and study computer science. I’m in a super easy introductory class right now, but this sets up the basics for everything ahead.

I’m ready for it, and I’ve started this blog to keep track of the new discoveries I make along the way. Feel free to leave any suggestions, comments, or encouragements. And thanks for visiting!