Derek Winton

There are essentially three sections to this site:

1. Static pages
2. The blog
3. AJAX pages

Publishing sections 1 and 2 using wordpress ensured a consistent look between those two but what about section 3? I thought it best to use the same stylesheet (not two copies of the same stylesheet) for the inevitable modifications in the future but that meant modifying my AJAX templates to the wordpress format. Easier said than done when the wordpress structure is buried in amongst php code and split between several files.

The solution – easy when you know how – view the source code from a browser. Hey presto, component files combined and php stripped out and you can now see the elements which make up a standard worpress page. It’s then just a matter of renaming my page elements using the wordpress standard. Well almost, there’s a weird bit of inline style info in the header which is easy to miss and throws the look of the whole page. Also the footer only works properly when it contains a line break within a single paragraph. These minor (about 1/2 an hour to work out each!) niggles aside and now the whole site has a consistent theme.

Next job – tidy up the default wordpress style.css which seems to be bloated with redundant code.

Had a brainwave. Why not publish my whole site using wordpress (except the ajax parts)? I can now manage all text / image content from any location with a web browser.

Just need to improve the default theme. A snazzy header image perhaps.

Tables are handy for structuring form content (perhaps slightly against strict css principles), column auto-sizing means you don’t need to worry about setting column widths when you don’t know what size each one should be.

What about when you want forms in a tabular format? Eg. Say you want to list rows from a database with the ability to edit any one of those rows using form elements – essentially a table (or list I suppose) of forms. Computer says no. You can have forms within a table cell or a table within a form but you can’t designate a larger part of a table as a form. It makes sense from a programming point of view but means you can’t use those nice table auto-sizing behaviours.

The solution – fixed width inline elements allows table style display but means you have to set the element widths manually. A bit of a pain but does the job.

Just a test to check everything’s working