I’m not even going to acknowledge my terrible blogging habits ( or in reality, lack thereof ) and get to a little something something that will hopefully be of some use to someone.

With html5 making a lot of noise and gaining steam ( Google Voice & Youtube as examples ), it’s only a matter of time.

On January 25th, 2010, a nice chap by the name of Nathan Staines released his html5 version of Elliot Jay Stocks‘ Starkers theme.

As I’m still in the process of learning the nuances of html5 I decided to use Starkers html5 as a learning ground. Being a typical twitter user I let the world know what I was up to. Nathan fairly quickly responded, asking my thoughts and recommendations on any adjustments, I replied in kind.

I sat down to see if I could tackle it, I’ve always been a bit wary of messing with the comments code for wordpress seeing as recursive code can get complicated if you don’t know exactly what is going on. I thought it was an excellent opportunity to learn and I came up with a (mostly) strait forward quick fix for now. I still want to go back and rewrite the wp_list_comments(); function but that will have to wait as I have other priorities.

My quick fix:

In the comments.php template file find this bit of code:

<?php wp_list_comments(...); ?> 

We’ll be using this instead:

<?php wp_list_comments('style=div&callback=html5_comment&end-callback=html5_closecomment'); ?>
'

In your theme’s functions.php file we’ll be adding the following code:

// Changes the trailing </li> into a trailing </article>
function html5_closecomment() {?>
	</article>
<?php
	}

// This is the new comment markup - edit as you feel necessary
function html5_comment($comment, $args, $depth) {
   $GLOBALS['comment'] = $comment; ?>

	<article id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>" <?php comment_class(); ?>>
		<header class="comment-author vcard">
			<?php echo get_avatar($comment,$size='48',$default='<path_to_url>' ); ?>

			<?php printf(__('<cite class="fn">%s</cite> says:'), get_comment_author_link()) ?>

			<p><time pubdate><?php edit_comment_link(__('(Edit)'),'  ','') ?></time></p>

			<p><?php echo $args ['style']; ?></p>

		</header>
		<?php if ($comment->comment_approved == '0') : ?>
			<p><?php _e('Your comment is awaiting moderation.') ?></p>
		<?php endif; ?>

		<?php comment_text() ?>

		<footer class="reply"><?php comment_reply_link(array_merge( $args, array('depth' => $depth, 'max_depth' => $args['max_depth']))) ?></footer>

<?php
	}

<article>

    <article> 
    
    </article>
</article>
...
...

Usually, theme’s wrap the wp_list_comments(); call in an ordered list, this isn’t necessary for our super awesome html5 anymore since articles can (and I guess should) be nested. Personally I wrapped it in a div with “the_comments” as a class ( For styling purposes mainly. ).

These are the only changes I made to the starkers html5, take a look for yourself.

Feel free to use, modify and share as you like. Try to give references where they are due though, that’s all I ask.

Once I rewrite the function for wp_list_comments to handle ‘style=article’ I’ll let you all know.

More on html5

W3C html5 spec overview

WhatWG.org html5 Working Draft

html5Doctor

html5 Gallery

Who: Meet Mark Taylor.
What: Mark is the owner of TAYLORMARK, a Digital Life Service. They offer services in recover, support, banking and consulting. What are they using WP for? It runs their website!
When: Mark got into wordpress THIS MONTH! Can you believe that?! And his company was a WCDFW09 sponsor too, that is some quick work and adoption!
Where: Mark is from the big D.
How: He is using WP so he doesn’t have to rely on a coder/designer to make small changes, updates and modifications. “It just allows our business to be nimble. I get to prototype the site will satisfaction then publish it.”

Be sure and follow her on Twitter or check out his website. You can also follow his company on twitter at: http://twitter.com/taylormark.

The wordpress community in Dallas is still around, even if Wordcamp is over. If you’d like to introduce yourself and get to know some of us, let me know or @ me. I’d love to give you a quick interview and help introduce you!

Be sure and check out the DFW wordpress meet up group. We meet once a month and it is always a great time. If you are on twitter, we use the hashtag #dfwwp so you can follow the conversations there too.

I’ll be honest, I just had the idea to cover this event last night and I really had no idea how much effort it would take. It just seemed like a good idea at the time. I wanted to cover DFW Wordcamp 2009 from two perspectives, from what the speakers were talking about and who was in the audience hearing it.

I wanted to cover the attendees by a simple interview. I ask them the 4 w’s and 1 h (Who, What, When, Where, & How) and introducing them to the DFW WP community, that is it. Pretty simple huh?

You can follow along in the series here or request to be an interviewee on my twitter or simply leave a comment here.

I had the pleasure of meeting Josiah Platt at the 2009 DFW Wordcamp. Seems like a really cool guy.

Who: Meet Josiah.
What: Josiah is a front-end designer & developer. He is also the Director of Web Techonologies at Project 7 and also the co-founder of Magnt. Currently he uses WordPress to run his personal blog and uses it for the majority of his clients.
When: Josiah got into wordpress way back when it was first kicked off and has been hooked ever since. He has experimented and used other CMS solutions but he still swears by wordpress.
Where: Josiah is from Dallas, Texas.
How: Josiah is using wordpress in a multitude of ways, but to sum up how excited he was when describing it to me: “WordPress is the easiest, most usable, accessible solution.”

For more info on Josiah, check him out at his blog and follow him on twitter.

Be sure to check out his projects Magnt and Project 7.

If you are a member of the #WCDFW09 WordPress community then let me know on twitter and I can get your W4H1 too!

Point 1: Core Branding Value
- “Know your brand, know your audience.”

Point 2: Start Compelling Conversations

Point 3: Be an Asset: Add Value!

Point 4: Make friends, not fans.
- “Listen to your community, but don’t be changed by your community.”

Point 5: Show Appreciation.
- “Show appreciation, hit the reply button. Do it.”

Point 6: Take Breaks!
- “Give your audience a chance to miss you.”

Point 7: Always be Upgrading!
- “Kubrick is ok! Start, then upgrade.”

For more on Cali, visit her blog or at geekbrief.tv

The wordpress advantage.

Stable.
Mature.
Good-Looking.
Open.
Extensible.
Own your own data.
Dominate the search engines.
Easily Manage Multimedia.
Easily Manage External Data.

To see the full slideshow, Tony C has kindly added it to Slideshare.net already.

And Tony C taking the stage.

They have a RSS that is pulling in the hash tag: wcdfw09 from twitter and flickr so check that out for more coverage.

Twitter wcdf09

flickr wcdfw09

I’ve never been to wordcamp so I have no idea what to expect at all.

I’ve never done mobile coverage of an event before either, so I have no idea what to expect there either.

Should be an interesting weekend, come say hi, I’d love to meet you if you are here. You can find me on Twitter @m_a_simo too.

Stay tuned!

So, I’m trying to pull a custom field and setting the result as $sortingTag I’m then trying to query_posts looking in a particular category and by a certain tag.

Here is the code I’m using:

<?php if ( (is_page('web')) or (is_page('print')) or (is_page('identity')) ) {

$sortingTag = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'sorting-tag', true);		

query_posts(array(
	'cat'=>17,
	'showposts'=>15,
	'tag'=>"$sortingTag",
));
?>

Here is how I’m trying to implement it:

I’ve set up child pages ‘web’, ‘identity’, & ‘print’ under the parent ‘Portfolio’. On each page I’ve set a custom field with the key ‘sorting-tag’ with it’s respective page name (i.e. web for web).

And I’m using posts to hold my portfolio pieces, depending on the project each could have one or more of the tags ‘web’, ‘identity’, or ‘print’ (spelled the same, with same case).

Now my problem, I figure I’d be able to pass the custom field and search by that value for the post tags. But it isn’t populating the loop at all, I do get a populated loop when I change ‘tag’ to ‘tag_slug’ but it still isn’t changing the query results, it is as if they are still unfiltered..

Anyone have any help or run into this before? I’d love to sort this out… lol sort. Get it?!? Haha, sorry, couldn’t help myself…

But seriously, little help… and if you could pass this on to your wordpress guru’s that’d be sweet too.

I was at the DFW WordPress May Meetup earlier today (at BJ’s) and met some really smart people that know a whole heck of a lot more than I do (and are much further along “the road” than I am).

One guy in particular, Randy Hoyt, was a great resource for what I’m attempting to do with wordpress. After talking with him for about 5 minutes, we got on the subject of Custom Field’s and he said Custom Field Template was a great tool that would help me achieve my goals.

Needless to say, I left the DFWWP Meetup pretty pumped to get back to my computer to start playing around with all the ideas of what I could do bouncing around in my head!

After I got the CFT plugin installed I decided to take it for a test drive so to speak. (*As I’m new to a lot of this, the nomenclature I use may be off a little, as I continue I hope I do a good enough job describing the process I followed. Also, if there is a better/more effective/efficient process than what I’ve followed, please, enlighten me!)

I made a custom field template that I titled “Portfolio” with the plans of handling all of the ‘extra’ data associated with a portfolio piece (i.e. Client Name, Client Quote, Portfolio Image, Skills used, etc…)

There is a great post by Gabriel Serafini (@gserafini) in which he highlights and does pretty good walk through of setting up your own CFT template. I won’t go into it here, check out his post.

Here we go! I had my template all set up and rigged up some test posts to test out the functionality and work out any bugs. All of the ‘simple’ fields worked beautifully (client_name, portfolio_image, etc…) but I had put in a custom field ‘skills_used’ that utilized checkboxes. Since you can click on more than one box it passes an array to that custom field, which I haven’t had to deal with up to this point. I didn’t know if I could parse the array successfully and apply the html tags I wanted to it as well and place it in the wp template I needed it in.

I found some good posts on the net but nothing that really dealt specifically with this particular issue (granted, I’m sure it is out there, I looked for like 5 minutes max…) so I rolled up my sleeves and went to work.

Here is what I came up with, I’m sure it is pretty sloppy (I consider myself a php novice pretty much.) but it works like a beauty. I decided to wrap everything in an unordered list and wrap each skill used in it’s own list item.

<?php //get skills_used (custom field) ?>
<?php $skills = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'skills_used'); ?>

<?php if(empty($skills)) {
	//if $skills is empty DO NOTHING!!!
}
else {

	echo '<ul class="skills-used">

		<li class="skills-used-title"><h4>Skills Used:</h4></li>';

	foreach ($skills as $skill) {
	    echo '<li class="'."$skill".'">'."$skill</li>";
	}

	echo "</ul>";
}
?>

*this code was placed into the single template file for my portfolio category posts* (It can go in any wp template you need it to go into, sidebar.php, single.php, etc…)

Description: I passed the custom field ‘skills_used’ which was part for the template that I created in CFT ( Remember the checkboxes? Ya, those guys.) to a variable $skills. Then I tested this variable to see if it was empty, if it was empty I wanted it to do NOTHING, although, if it had the good stuff, I wanted it. But the question was, how to get all of it. Enter “foreach”, basically, the jist of what is happening here is that I’m splitting the array apart and labeling each part it pulls off as the variable $skill (not plural!) echo’s it after wrapping it in the li tag, then forgetting it and moving to the next one, until there is nothing left. Tack on the close ul tag and wrap up the php.

An astute student would notice two ‘$skill’ varables being used each foreach. Very good padawan, I want css control over each one, so I’m listing the class of the list item as $skill. This way, if I use Photoshop CS4 for a particular project, I can place a sexy little blue square with “Ps” carved into it.

That, my friends, is what was so cool that it got me blogging at 1:30 am (pardon my spelling!). There is a whole lot of cool stuff you can do with custom fields and similar implementations to this, it just takes a little imagination and experimentation. Enjoy!