It’s been a while since I’ve updated you on the status of my design work. I actually feel like I’ve made strides in that time. I’ve borrowed a book from my friend Rekabutt on CSS and standards based design, “The Zen of CSS Design.” I’ve been reading through the first chapter in that book and referencing the many designs on the website. My thanks to Rekabutt for her generosity in letting me borrow this book.
My friend Mizidy alerted me to a program called Wamp. This program installs Apache server with support for PHP and MySQL on your computer. It allows me to install WordPress locally and do all my design on my local computer - very helpful. I just got that running tonight. This will be very helpful, as I was designing last night and constantly uploading my index.php and style.css files to my web server to test changes in my basic code for my WordPress theme.
Currently, I have a working index.php file that grabs the posts from my MySQL database and displays author and post information. Everything is unstyles, but functional, working XHTML and PHP. I had it up and actually running overnight as I forgot to use WordPress’s theme manager to revert back to the one I’ve chosen as a default until I get my own functional. This was a big step for me and I was very excited to see that my XHTML and PHP was working properly. I’ve taken one of the main lessons to be found in “The Zen of CSS Design,” separating your markup code and styling, to heart in this instance.
Tonight I’m going to try and revisit the code and make sure it validates as valid XHTML. Then, hopefully I’ll find time to start visiting the style sheet for the theme.
Tags: 3 Comments
3 responses so far ↓
Well looks like I must come and be the defender of the true and the ruby. Let me recommend Instant Rails to you http://instantrails.rubyforge.org/. Instant rails is self a self contained setup of Ruby, Rails, Apache, and MySQL. All of them configured to run, just plop them in a folder (without spaces) and run the exe and you have a server with ruby on rails to play with.
It comes with the basic cookbook example and a working install of the latest stable version of typo (2.6). I just installed it tonight and works pretty damn slick. I shall be using it to theme my blog
It may not properly validate because it is still a php page. The validator can’t work with those properly all the time.
I’m glad you like the book.
[...] After a recent comment on Ben’s blog by TheChris, I felt the need to give my two cents to all reading about blogging software. There has been a small feud at work recently between TheChris and I about WordPress vs. Typo. For those unfamiliar with the two different programs, the main difference is that WordPress is written in PHP and Typo uses the newer Ruby on Rails. My opinion is that WordPress works just fine and my headaches when trying to get Typo installed have led me to discourage newer users from trying it. For someone like Ben, WordPress may not have all of the bells and whistles that Typo has, but it is built on a well established language (PHP) and while it doesn’t have the community of a Typo or Flock, it does have many sites that provide support and help for theming Wordpress. [...]