Getting used to my new blog

Good morning... my first post using WP!

So wow, I'm going to have to get used to putting my thoughts into a much different UI than the very simple "title, body" form I had using my own system. But you know, now that I've made the switch I can see that it was definitely the right thing to do. I'll be able to get 99% of the functionality of my old blog and once I understand how WP works under the hood a bit more I'm sure I'll get to 100%. For example - I already added a little bit of PHP code to the single.php template to only show my ads if there's a referrer from another site. This makes browsing a lot easier. I also threw in the StatCounter javascript at the bottom of the template as well which was really easy. I guess like most things in the world, it seems daunting until you actually just sit down and do it.

The template obviously is the first thing that needs to be tweaked. I really don't like side bars in blogs, so I've been looking this morning at various templates that take the sidebar out and add in a menu at the top. I'm actually still a little bit confused on how this is done, but I don't think it's all the difficult, I just need to work it out.

There are definitely things that I'm excited about with this system. I like the idea that if I do some neat tweak, I can wrap it up and a bunch of other WP users might benefit from it. I like the ability to add Pages as well - this makes WP into a content management system of sorts - beyond just for blogging. On my custom blog, I had some basic photo album and video features as well - I'll have to see if I can work out adding that stuff in, or seeing if there's a plug in.

Helge in my comments recommended the RunPHP Plugin which allows you to just add PHP into your blog. This combined with Pages makes the whole system *very* powerful. I probably want to figure out how to add things in a more traditional page approach first, but that adds great hackabillity and really shows the difference between PHP and Java.

Okay. Prepare to hear more about this soon... :-)

-Russ

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