15 replies to this topic

[tommr]

I am trying to build a site using a child of twenty ten and I am having some trouble understanding the custom menu function.
When I go to the menu tab under appearance I see the notice that says " your theme supports 1 menu, select the menu you would like to use"

I would like to have a custom menu or two.

After posting in the website hospital I got some good help but at that time I had butchered the theme. Instead of creating a child theme I uploaded an exact copy of the twenty ten them to a separate directory and began to alter the header and the css. Since I did not understand and feared this really did not constitute a child theme I tried to ad the template info to the css and the whole install broke.

I deleted all the files and datebase and did a fresh install creating a folder for the child and uploading the css and header I wanted to edit with the ( i hope ) proper formatting.

Once I got it going again I switched to my child theme and created my top navigation bar menu using the wordpress admin. and it seems to be working fine.

Now I want to have some pages appear only in the sidebar menu. I created a menu and moved some pages into the menu and saved the whole thing. But when I go to the widgets page I do not see the menu. Only a custom menu widget that seems empty and which I can not drag anywhere.

I also wanted some footer menus but at this rate I wonder if I am headed down the wrong trail.

The only changes I have made have been to the css and the header files, which I uploaded to the child theme folder.

Here is the header for the css.

/*
Theme Name: Twenty Ten Child
Theme URI: http://wordpress.org/
Description: The 2010 theme for WordPress is stylish, customizable, simple, and readable -- make it yours with a custom menu, header image, and background. Twenty Ten supports six widgetized areas (two in the sidebar, four in the footer) and featured images (thumbnails for gallery posts and custom header images for posts and pages). It includes stylesheets for print and the admin Visual Editor, special styles for posts in the "Asides" and "Gallery" categories, and has an optional one-column page template that removes the sidebar.
Author: the WordPress team
Version: 1.3
License: GNU General Public License
License URI: license.txt
Template:	   twentyten
Tags: black, blue, white, two-columns, fixed-width, custom-header, custom-background, threaded-comments, sticky-post, translation-ready, microformats, rtl-language-support, editor-style, custom-menu
*/

Please if anyone can help...

[tommr]

Working now...

[Michael_Martinez]

Glad you got it working. I'm not sure I would have used Twenty Ten for a redesign, though. As basic themes goes it's pretty BASIC. There are a lot of free themes that do so much more.

[tommr]

I am just getting started so I could easily start over with a new theme. Can you recommend a theme that would be better for redesign? What should I look for when looking for a theme to start with?

One of the reasons I chose twenty ten is it seems like there are a lot of people working on it and a lot of help available in the wordpress forum with that theme.

Edited by tommr, 28 February 2012 - 05:44 PM.

[AbleReach]

Both Twenty Ten and Twenty Eleven had their debuts as default themes for WordPress because their code used most of what WordPress can do, out of the box. The bones are there for your customization. The same was true for Kubrick, in its day. There are not many built in bells and whistles in the admin area, especially with Twenty Ten, but then again, without that layer of coding there are fewer things for a beginner to get lost in.

For learning purposes you really can't do better than starting with a default theme. I think Twenty Ten and Twenty Eleven are both ideal foundations for child themes. They were developed to be nice foundations for child themes.

If you want to monkey around with fluid width display, Twenty Eleven's CSS is effective and interesting. If you're happier with fixed width, go with Twenty Ten. Exactly what comes next will depend on your interests, needs and level of expertise.

Do you still need help with figuring out how to customize your footer?

[Michael_Martinez]

I have to agree with that. If you're just learning how to do this, Twenty Ten and Twenty Eleven are probably the best choices available.

If, however, you just want more functionality, then I recommend running some searches on free themes through Wordpress' theme search tool. You might download and install a few and try them out. They are easy to install and uninstall.

You may want to set up a practice site where you don't care about the traffic just to evaluate themes and practice your child theme development.

[DonnaFontenot]

While we are on the subject of newbies and free themes, one word of advice.

Don't - I repeat - Don't google "free wordpress themes" or anything of the sort. You're almost guaranteed to end up with a free theme with built-in encoded garbage. Stuff that will either be malware or hidden links.

Premium themes from well-known places like themeforest, woothemes, elegantthemes, etc. are fine. Free themes from the official WordPress repository are fine. But don't take a chance on any free theme that you find in a google search. Just don't do it.

/warning

[tommr]

I really do not need to much razzle dazzle, I am just trying to make the choicefavors site looks somewhat like theweddingdept site.
The old site is a jumble of nested tables and anytime I want to change it I have to go through hundreds of pages.
So what I am trying to do with the wordpress site is have the static pages I have on the original site along with the blog posts and have it be seamless.

As far as the bottom navigation bar, I plan to use it for static links so I thought I would just hard code it but it is slow going and I have more tinkering to do.
I have a bar created and I can plug the links right in the footer.
Apparently there are div's? or something like that and since I can not understand how they work it takes me a fair bit of tinkering and fixing to get it right.

I really want to be able to handle my own theme and I thought a simple one would be the best route for now.

Thanks for all the input.

[AbleReach]

If you decide you'd like widgets or another custom menu in your footer, I'll walk you through. Just holler.

[tommr]

Thanks,
I am having brain lock with this project, here is the problem.
We have at least 25 separate designs. In 3 categories, chimes, ornaments and other.
In the past using html I was able to group the favors in these categories, having a main page for say chimes and then providing links and photos to each of the chimes from that page. Same with the ornaments and other. By listing them like this I was able to focus on the design, for example, dragonfly wedding favor or sand dollar wedding favor.
Also we want to market these for a number of themes; wedding, anniversary, 1st communion and more for a total of about 15.
The problem I am having is understanding if I can do this, having the separate category pages with a separate sidebar menu for each of the 3 categories with out having links to all the pages on all the pages. This would be a very long list.

[AbleReach]

You can have sidebar widgets that only show up when you're in specific places. You can do it in several different ways.

I have two sets of questions. First, think about how the site needs to function. Do you intend to have a blog, too? Will you be hooking the site up to a shopping cart? If it's going to have a cart, you might be better off starting with the cart.

Next, does struggling with code make you happy in the long run, or would you like it to be over as quickly as possible? Do you have an interest in learning how to code it?

Coding WordPres can be fidgety if you're not used to looking at php, but is still doable for anyone who understands nesting and has an eye for detail. You don't have to understand the whole php universe to make useful things happen.

[tommr]

I intend to use the site with a blog. I have a number of writers lined up and ready to go.
I have a cart, squirrel cart, and it seems to work ok. We have been using it for a number of years. I had thought I would link to it with buy buttons as I do now.
I have some experience with php as I have a site, artsandcraftsnetwork, that lists arts and crafts shows. I built a PHP script that lists shows and prints the details along with maps and weather for particular shows. I got help from PHP Freaks and the PHP/mySql dummies book.

Here is an example of how the script prints targeted ads for certain pages.
I can use text or images.

<?php foreach($ads as $ad): ?>
<?php if($ad['type'] == 'image'): ?>
  <p class="ad" style="text-align:left;"><a href="/ad.php?id=<?php echo $ad['id']; ?>"><img src="<?php echo $ad['fullimagefilename']; ?>" alt="Arts and Crafts Network" /></a></p>
<?php else: ?>
  <p class="ad" style="text-align:left;"><a href="/ad.php?id=<?php echo $ad['id']; ?>"><?php echo $ad['content']; ?></a></p>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php endforeach; ?>

My biggest problem is I do not retain some of the coding details so I would really like to set this up from the start.

The current site is such a mess that it is a wonder that it gets crawled at all and this is why I want to use some kind of CMS.

Additionally I want to switch to the new url to help reduce customer confusion. The favors can be used for more than just weddings. Placing for wedding favors is beyond my reach but we do get some hits and business from inside pages, like sand dollar wedding favors. I want to do that for corporate favors, fundraising and so on.

That said I posted a list of pages using custom menus and it does not look too unmanageable. I just am not sure if it makes sense to have links to all the pages form all the pages.

Edited by tommr, 05 March 2012 - 12:14 AM.

[AbleReach]

In that case, you might have fun with WordPress's reference for category functions.

You can do a conditional statement. If it's a child or an ancestor of whatever category, show this widgetized bit (plus whatever else you decide to tuck in), else if it's this other category show this other widgetized bit, else show whatever is to be shown if none of the above is to be shown.

If there are a limited number of categories and hard coding helps you keep track of what you did, try creating separate template files for each category. Then, your conditional statement might be more like this: if it's this category, load this sidebar template file, else if it's this other category, load this other sidebar template file, etc.

In some cases, if a thing is in multiple categories, WordPress will automatically use the first one I've forgotten if it's the first alphabetically or the first by category number, but once you get to that point it will be obvious. If you try something that gives unexpected results, it will be because of that sort of WP logic and you'll need to experiment with a different category function or refining your way of describing what you want.

To find the category number, go in the WP back end, go to Posts > Categories and hover over the category name. Look for the part of the link that says "_ID=" - for category number 3 you'd see "_ID=3". Category numbers are assigned depending on whatever category was created first. You can't change them, but they're not visible if you're using pretty permalinks.

[cre8pc]

Ditto what Donna said in her warning! I followed her suggestion last year and found ElegantThemes and ThemeForest to be wonderful to use and affordable! Genesis is pretty easy to use I guess. I didn't like it however. Found ElegantThemes far easier to use and customize. Their ad is on the Cre8asiteforums homepage for those who want to explore.

[tommr]

Wow,
That is a load of code! Thanks!

One question, can pages be listed in categories? Maybe I am missing something.

So what I need to do then is modify the side bar so that if pageid=166 then it will load a custom menu of my choice only.

or maybe load a special sidebar.

hmmmm maybe I should start with this one

<?php $args = array(
'sort_column' => 'menu_order, post_title',
'menu_class'  => 'menu',

[left]'include'	 => 'page id numbers separated by a ,',[/left]
'exclude'	 => '',
'echo'		=> true,
'show_home'   => false,
'link_before' => '',
'link_after'  => '' );
?>

The key is I want this to run menu=6 if page ID=166 is loaded.


One more thing. I do not want search engines looking at this while I am working. Where would be the best place to put a noindex nofollow tags

Edited by tommr, 06 March 2012 - 06:37 PM.

[AbleReach]

You can try using a plugin like WordPress Access Control to completely hide any unfinished parts from anyone but logged-in users with the right user rights. The WP forums show that some have had trouble with odd behavior, but so far I haven't seen any. I have a domain that I use only for test installations and it's working fine there. You could always go with one of the popular SEO plugins - Yoast's SEO plugin or All in one SEO pack have good reputations. If you want to do it manually, look for header.php and tuck your noindexy stuff in between the head tags.

After doing noindex/nofollow you may need to give spiders a nudge to get indexing going again. An xml sitemap will help with that... and inlinks are always golden.

To control which stuff loads depending on which page you're viewing, you can use is_page in the sidebar - check out the Page function list on the left of that function list link.

Part of the conditional statement in your sidebar could say

if ( is_page('3,5,6,7') ) get sidebar('butterfly')

The numbers after is_page are page ID numbers - find them the same way as the category ID numbers, by hovering over the link to the page in the back end. You can also use the slug, but they can get long and if you change the slug the site breaks. ID numbers are forever.

To follow this example you'd need to add a sidebar template named sidebar-butterfly.php.

There is also an "is_home" - scroll down to the left of the Function Reference link for a list of some conditional tags. Think of WordPress as a buffet line of pre-built, plug and play functions.