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Boring Administrata….

I’ve spent the last two days crawling through the inner workings of the site, trying to make it work better…. Half this post will read as “blah blah blah techno-blither blahdedattadee.” and I won’t be sad if you skip it. It’s mostly here to document some technical issues and how I resolved them, in case anyone is asking Google similar questions. ;)

The patterns/eBooks/cheat sheets/etc are now being displayed in a more compact, “easy to skim” format.  (No, really, take a look – it’s pretty slick.)  Also, I believe that older items (like the Alcega cheat sheet and the Printer Friendly Conic Block instructions will no longer disappear. Neat.

For the WP-geeks who might be searching the web trying to figure out why, oh why, WordPress continues to ignore custom taxonomy pages (ie, taxonomy-mytax.php), here’s a simple hack you can use to get around it. Create a general taxonomy.php file (I copied archives.php), and wrap the loop in the following logic:

//Now, we do something truly silly, because wordpress doesn't want to play nice with my
//taxonomy-downloads.php file - we're simply adding a giant horkin' if to control output.
//Actually, it might not be silly, since we can use the "store" display for multiple
//custom taxonomies without creating a zillion different taxonomy-foo.php files, but the
//expedient means of get_terms and in_array. I'm either lazy or brilliant...
$download_types = get_terms('download_types', 'fields=names&hide_empty=0'); $size_types = get_terms('size_types', 'fields=names&hide_empty=0');
if (in_array($term->name, $download_types) || in_array($term->name, $size_types)) {
//customized display loop
}else{
//standard display loop
}

(Apologies on the formatting – I’m just using a code tag!) Basically, if the term name we’ve been handed is in either of two custom taxonomies (download_types or size_types), I want to display it in a less blogalicious format. This little if statement saves be from making two taxonomy-whatsit.php files. I originally did it to get around taxonomy-whatsit.php being stubbornly ignored, regardless of how many times I reset permalinks. (And no, my taxonomy slugs don’t include the dashes. I thought of that one!) I kept it because it’s a pretty flexible way of dealing with the problem. I’m telling the interweb because a) it’s mildly clever, and b) I spent hours searching for a way to make WordPress acknowledge my taxonomy-whatsit.php files, and every silly string out there ends in “Oh, wait, I fixed my permalinkds/deleted .htaccess/renamed my tax slugs and it started working!” I did all that. It didn’t start working.

Also to be filed under “Why must you defy me, WordPress?!” is a still unresolved problem with trying to get anything that is not strictly a post into the RSS feed. I’ve tried several different instructions (admittedly, they’re all kinda the same), and still no luck. I’m saddened by that. So if you’re getting this through the RSS feed, but you check the site and see a million things that weren’t in the feed, this is the bug affecting you.  This site relies heavily on the functionality provided by WordPress’s Custom Types, which are super-great, but sometimes a little quirky. There’s definitely some quirkage.

There is a decent chance that I’ve fixed the problems plaguing my poor little automated file delivery system.  I think.  Someone bought something this afternoon, and I didn’t get *any* of the previous warnings, so either it is fixed, or it is broken in some new and interesting manner. I hope it’s fixed, but…. You know, I’ve gotten to meet and talk to so many cool people when I resend files, I’m almost sad!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled costume blog.

I’ve been a very good girl and done all my homework. May I go play with my dollies now?  ;)

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