I have started with a basic Dreamweaver template to place the main DIVs in the layout that I am trying to produce. Dreamweaver template files are the perfect starting point because they are basic layouts with CSS properties already defined, and they have extensive notes explaining each element of the layout. Here is the page layout I have created starting from a Dreamweaver template:

http://74.54.4.213/blog/wordpresslayout.html

Here are the files that I edited in order to insert the wordpress functionality into my template:

Page Template (page.php): This is the page that is called when you click on links to ‘pages’ on your blog.
Main Index Template (index.php) This file controls the layout of the main index page.

Single Post (single.php) This file is called when you click on blog post - it shows a single blog post.

Stylesheet (stylesheet.css) The stylesheet.

To start, I BACKED EVERYTHING UP. Then, I pasted all the CSS that was generated by the dreamweaver template at the end of style.css. I began hacking index.php by re-naming the DIVs to match my template, being careful to keep all the PHP intact. I eliminated the sidebar function, and placed some filler text in the new DIV that I created. I found that the container DIV for my template needed to be placed before the header.php file was called in index.php in order for everything to display correctly - this is most definitely a hack, as there was nothing like that in the old theme.

I did the same for header.php and footer.php, as well as single.php and page.php.

This seemed to work until…I realized the wordpress theme is a BEAST. It was ambitious, but I guess it is going to take more than two weeks to master this art. Currently, I am running with a hacked-up version of a template submitted by the community - changes sure to be coming soon!

V.2:

Step #2:

Step #3:

Profit.

EchoAbility has been in a dormant state for a few months. To give it new life, we are moving it off of the old Joomla platform. We are going to move to a hybrid of Wordpress and Drupal for the new site, and are hoping that the change will give the project more legs this season. We’ve outgrown Joomla and are looking for a new challenge!

To start, I have installed Wordpress and moved the few blog posts we had on the old site into the new platform. Wordpress was a delight to install, and I was able to create a sleek template in just under two hours. Here is a shot of the new Echo in its first manifestation:

The things I LOVE about Wordpress thus far:

• Intallation was SO easy
• The admin interface is sexy right out of the box (okay, it’s not that important but it is nice!)
• You can edit the CSS file from the admin interface
• The WISYG editor is pretty nice - much better than Joomla’s - especially in the code view

Next steps will be to play around with Wordpress to see how versatile it is, and to get more of a feel for the community. I want to find a way to integrate our other blogs into the echo[blog] to centralize the information. Then, in a few weeks we’ll move onto Drupal integration as we start to fill out the site.

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