Meta

I took the searchbox off of our theme when we first messed with the theme because (a) I didn’t like the way it looked and (b) I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to search through this ‘waste of time’ of a website. Well, I needed to search for something today, and so I put one back up. I didn’t want to add another ‘thought bubble’ to the right hand side, so I fit one into the categories block. Here’s the code:

<br />
<i>
<form id=”searchform” method=”get” action=”<?php echo $_SERVER[‘PHP_SELF’]; ?>”>>
<input type=”text” name=”s” id=”s” size=”15″ value=”search ’em all” onFocus=”this.value=”” />
<input style=”display:none;” type=”submit” value=”<?php _e(‘Search’); ?>” />
</form>
</li>

Lauren wanted to add little ‘blurbs’ about things that she’s found on the internet that she’d like to share with anyone who’s interested in wasting more time, but she didn’t want to add them as real posts, because they don’t really have much to do with us.

Initially I thought she could do that with a single page that she updates when she wants to add stuff, but then I found something that I really wanted to share, but wasn’t really the sort of post that we’ve been doing, so I looked again into finding a plugin that would keep posts in certain categories off of the front page. My last attempt at a plugin like that broke something else (I don’t remember what). But this plugin by Rich Hamilton seems to work fine. And, as an added bonus, these ‘meta’ posts that no one is really interested in are not off the front page as well.

Part two is listing these posts somewhere. For that I’m going to try this plugin by Scott Reilly.

Here’s the function I’ll use with default:

function c2c_get_recent_posts ($num_posts = 5,
$format = “[li]%post_date%: %post_URL%[/li]”,
$categories = ”,
$orderby = ‘date’,
$order = ‘DESC’,
$offset = 0,
$date_format = ‘m/d/Y’,
$authors = ”,
$include_passworded_posts = false)

Here’s the snippet of code for the sidebar:

[li][h2]Found[/h2]
[ul]
[?php c2c_get_recent_posts(5,”[li]%post_date%: %post_URL%[/li]”,’Found’); ?]
[/ul]
[/li]

And here’s the complete lists of variables that work:

%comments_count% // Number of comments for post
%comments_fancy% // Fancy reporting of comments: (see get_recent_tagmap())
%comments_url% // URL to top of comments section for post
%comments_URL% // Post title linked to the top of the comments section on post’s permalink page
%last_comment_date% // Date of last comment for post
%last_comment_id% // ID for last comment for post
%last_comment_URL% // URL to most recent comment for post
%last_commenter% // Author of last comment for post
%last_commenter_URL // Linked (if author URL provided) of author of last comment for post
%post_author% // Author for post
%post_author_count% // Number of posts made by post author
%post_author_posts% // Link to page of all of post author’s posts
%post_author_url% // Linked (if URL provided) name of post author
%post_content% // Full content of the post
%post_date% // Date for post
%post_excerpt% // Excerpt for post
%post_excerpt_short% // Customizably shorter excerpt, suitable for sidebar usage
%post_id% // ID for post
%post_modified% // Last modified date for post
%post_title% // Title for post
%post_url% // URL for post
%post_URL% // Post title linked to post’s permalink page

Just to be complete, I also added a table to the ‘stuff’ sidebar so that I could have two collumns. I know, I should have used CSS for that. Tough.