I’m a bit of a geek, and having worked in the computer industry for 20 years or so, I can’t help this geekery spilling over into my home life. So when I get something new (in this case the WordPress blog) I like to delve behind the scenes and see how it all fits together.
As a result, I’m able to tweak the system to get it to work the way I want it to work. Nothing major, just little things here and there. The first thing I did is to find a theme I liked the look of. You’re looking at it now 
But there were one or two things about it I didn’t like. For example, the monthly archives. When you click on a monthly archive, I want the entries to be shown chronologically, instead of “last post first”, which is the default behaviour. Doesn’t it make more sense to have the first entries at the top of the page, so you can just read it all in the right order? I think it does, so I changed that. I still need to play around with the stylesheet and layout a little bit, I don’t like the way the post headings show up differently in archive listings to the way they show on the main page. This may mean that I develop my own theme from scratch, we’ll see how it goes.
The other thing I’ve done, is to write a plugin for WordPress that shows random images from my Pixelpost photo blog over in the sidebar. As this was the first plugin I’d written, it took a few hours, even though I’d done some php and mysql stuff before. I just wasn’t familiar with the way WordPress wanted things to be done. But, as you can see, I got there in the end. The plugin went through many changes before it ended up as the finished article.
I first thought about having it show the latest image, one random image, and a random category. Then I simplified the idea just to show a few random images. Then I wrote a settings page for the admin user to enter the details of the pixelpost database (since the plugin would have to get its data from the pixelpost database it would make sense if it knew how to connect to it). Then I realised that the settings for the database are held in a config file, just as they are with wordpress, so it might as well read the settings straight from the file. Then I widgetised the plugin, and moved all the settings to the widget control panel. Then I realised that if you log in to the blog as an author instead of an administrator, you can’t see the widget control panel, but you can still see the settings. So I moved them all back again. Then I put some code in so the user can define the headings, and to say how many columns they wanted the images showing in. Then I realised that the sidebar automatically wraps the images when it needs to, changing from three columns to two, so I took that bit out. And the final result is what you see here! Easy, isn’t it?
That’s the beauty of open source software, if you don’t like something, you can change it. Mind you, that’s the same as saying if you don’t like having to go to work on public transport, why don’t you learn to fly a plane and do it that way instead?
