Huzza for the blog! It’s completely ridiculous to consider implementing “blog functionality” a feat when you’re using WordPress as the engine for your site. However, I have some (somewhat) legitimate reasons for being pleased. At least, that’s what I tell myself so I can sleep at night.

I chose to use WP in more of a CMS respect for ease of updating the folio (and updating everything else, for that matter). In previous iterations of pseudoroom, my good friend, former business partner, and overall wünderkind Mike Lovett had built a custom CMS for folio / download / general content management. It was a thing of beauty, with an ugly-ass name: the prat (the latter word being an acronym for….something. I forget). Since the days of Mike, Marc Clancy, and myself working as a “global design consortium” (as one of my former clients put it), we’ve moved on to our own respective “day jobs”, in our own respective fields. As such, when I had to transition the site back into a solo effort, asking for tweaks to the prat became a hassle for all of us. Enter WordPress: a system I could implement, update, and design around on my own.

In initially setting this install up as (mostly) a folio display module, I built a template lacking many of the features that are inherent in a blog, to better suit my needs: comments, the typical use of posting / archives, date / time stamping, avatar and tag support, etc. My current reality is that I don’t get the chance, nor have the energy, to do (much, if any) freelance work anymore. Beyond designing some UI customization pieces here and there, there wasn’t much else to keep the site fresh. Hey, here’s an idea: how about blogging on design / Mac topics, since GUI Galaxy is in flux? Hmm….woops.

Immediately some conceptual issues were evident: I was using the different broad iterations of my design work (graphic, identity, interface, and web) as my “post categories”. My “archives” were the individual folio piece pages. For a blog, I’d want to have things like recent comments, or a dated archive of posts, present in the sidebar. How could I get that to show up only in a potential blog section’s sidebar, but no where else on the site? One thing about WP: you know if you’ve got a perplexing issue or are looking for a workaround, someone else has already had it. Thanks to the WP community, someone’s also probably solved it:

Communal archive problem? Duplicate the archive.php file, assigning the new file, in its title, the ID of the category whom you want to have a unique presentation. Post-customization, this enabled me to give the new “pseudoroom blog” category its own feature set without screwing with the folio. Different sidebar presentations on different pages, categories, or archives? The Widget Logic plugin utilizes Conditional Tags to enable the flexibility to display whatever you want, wherever you want it.

After those, plus innumerable other small hurdles, here we are. A single back-end system playing nicely both as a folio display engine and blogging software. The fact that a php gimp like myself could customize WP to this point is a testament to how tremendous the software and community really are.