Deborah Woehr

One of my top goals when I returned from my vacation was to crack open this book and take a shot at building my first WordPress theme. I tried to follow the author’s step-by-step instructions but got totally confused and frustrated. This section is not for the complete WordPress novice, especially if they don’t know a lick of php or css. I know the difference, although I’m far from a whiz. Hence, why I bought this book.

In one portion of the exercise, the author blended the css code in the middle of the php code. If you’ve worked with WordPress files, you know that style.css and .php files are separate. I spent at least four hours the Sunday before last, trying to get the code in order and functioning properly. In the end, I set the book down and haven’t touched it since. I’d recommend this book for beginner bloggers because Hayder does cover the blogosphere as a whole. For theme design, fugeddaboudit. Look elsewhere.

Out of frustration last week, I took the files from this theme, uploaded them onto a test file on my server and knocked the hell out of them to see if I could produce a traditional website interface from WordPress. I stopped when the theme started to break and didn’t touch it until today. For some reason, luck was with me today because I got the skeleton of my husband’s website up, along with a Contact and a map page. Step two in this project involves learning how to write exceptional web copy that will draw in some more business. That’s for a later post.

Right now, I’ll put up my feet and celebrate this small victory.

I received the new upgrade for Movable Type yesterday and like the new WYSIWYG interface. The only real issues I’m having with it are with Firefox. It doesn’t want to publish my posts. This problem doesn’t occur in Netscape or Safari.

However, the WYSIWYG doesn’t work in Safari, and the text doesn’t format correctly. That’s too bad because I was hoping to ditch Netscape in the near future. Now, it looks like I’ll have to rely on it to publish my blog.

One more thing: I disabled the trackback feature because it was used more for spammers than anything else. 

Xoops was actually my favorite out of the three programs. They have some really cool plugins. My biggest problem with Xoops was the ability to customize the skin. After searching through their forum, I was able to figure out how to upload my logo. At the time, I had no knowledge of CMS and very little HTML. So, it was a very frustrating experience.

Also, my site loaded very slowly on my dialup connection. I continued adding content and installing new plugins. The more plugins I installed, the slower the loadtime became. Then I started having problems logging in. I would have to enter my information twice. After my experience with Geeklog, I was afraid that I was eventually going to get locked out.

I may return to Xoops when I have the spare time to fiddle with it. The biggest frustration with these CMS programs was the wasted weeks of writing time.

Drupal is a very good program on the surface. It offers clean looking theme templates and a variety of plugins. However, it was buggy right from the start, especially after you install a few plugins. Some of these plugins require you to build tables in MySQL.

I found this out the hard way and was forced to learn how to do this. That wasn’t a bad thing. But some of the code these plugins came with didn’t work. I started receiving all kinds of error messages both in my Admin section and in the header of the main site.

Once again, I found myself having problems switching themes. I’d click on one of the other templates, hit the Save button, and . . . no change. WTF! I found nothing in the support forums at the same time and decided not to bother.

Instead, I focused on writing the rough draft of my story. About a month ago, my CPanel announced the latest upgrade. I clicked on the upgrade button and found my header littered with error messages.

By this time, I was done with Drupal.

Oliver asked me to clarify why I gave Geeklog, Drupal, and Xoops a poor rating in my prior posts. I’ll start with Geeklog, listing the positives as well as the negatives.

I liked Geeklog’s layout. For one, I could post static articles without having to install a plugin. Geeklog offers hundreds of plugins that give your site added functionality. The older version allowed me to switch themes very easily.

However, customizing them to upload my logo was a chore. At the time, I had very little knowledge of HTML and none of CSS. After some fiddling, I was able to upload my logo and tweak the code so it would show. But the image was too small, and I couldn’t figure out how to change that.

Then I made the mistake of upgrading Geeklog on my server. The toggle to switch themes was gone. So, I searched the Geeklog documentation and found it useless. This made me Google for Geeklog tutorials. I found this link: MindFab.com - How do I change the default theme on my site?

I followed the procedures to the letter. Within 24 hours I was locked out. I tried editing the config.php file back to the original, with no result. By this time, I was so frustrated with the header bugs that kept appearing on my site that I wiped the software off my server.

I would not recommend Geeklog for newbies who have no knowledge of HTML. The code is so intertwined that one mistake can destroy your website. Read the complaints (and praise) at Opensourcecms.com and Geeklog Installation Forum.