Just Search Labs Just Search Research and Development

No Wordpress is not a CMS. It was never intended to be either. It is the best free blogging platform out there but that’s where it stops.

Now there is no reason why we shouldn’t do it if want to. The web is a nice place to play around and if you feel confident with wordpress you can always give it a go.

The page / boxes architecture

Cool name isn’t it? The difficult thing with every CMS is to keep the user away from any code. In wordpress’s editor you can write everything in the html part and us divs and other html tags. But think from a client point of view. They don’t know about html or if they think they do you better not look at their code… Read the rest of this entry »

Benoit Gilloz
Programmer, Research and Development

Much of the really cool stuff I would like talk about is top-secret or ongoing research. With this subject matter out of bounds, writing an original blog is not an easy thing to do. The thought of having to craft a good piece of writing and put it out on the web for everyone to see can be daunting process. It is not surprising that even the best of us get occasional bouts blogger’s block.

An Authroratitive Image

1. Sometimes you might have the grain of an idea but don’t know how to proceed. Write out your  idea and try to grow it from the central idea outwards. Every blog post can have an introduction and a  conclusion.  If you can get a few ideas on paper then you can start to pad them out to make a blog post.
2. Images can be used illustrate and pad out a short blog post. This is not just a cop-out. A well chosen image can illustrate an make the  shorter blog post more authoritative.
3. Write about anything. This is called free writing. You don’t have to post it. The act of writing itself may free your writing block and give you an idea for your real post of the day.
4. Use your experience. Write about a specific experience that happened to you and relate it to another story.
5. Look on the web to find a question that you can answer. I find that reading the comments on other people’s blogs can often generate an idea for a blog post.
6. Do something else – by doing something other than sitting at the computer hoping for inspiration, going off to do something different can stimulate the galvanic spark of inspiration.
7. If you are writing on a regular basis you will know that there are good times to write and bad times to write. Obviously you should write in the good times and not in the bad.
8. Impose a deadline on your blog post that will make just make you write something rather than worry about whether it is worthy of a SEMMY.
9. If you have gone through this list of tips and are still unable to find your creative muse you could always write a post about about overcoming blogger’s block.

Sir Pumpkin Longshanks
Programmer, Research and Development

I wrote last week about automatically displaying a picture on each post with wordpress. Now I would like to expand a bit on the custom request and show how to pull a random picture from the picture attachment of a page/post.

Let’s say you want to have random picture on a banner on your home page for example. Start by creating a template for the page called “home”. Then create a page called home in wordpress and assign it the “home” template.

The code in your home.php or whatever you called the home template file should look something like this: Read the rest of this entry »

Benoit Gilloz
Programmer, Research and Development

Today we are going to do some simple Wordpress programming. I would like to show how easy it is to get attachment from a post, in our case images, and display them how we want.

The idea is to display an image floated right at the beginning of each post without having to insert it into the WYSIWYG editor of  Wordpress.  The reason is tinyMCE doesn’t always show it how I want it and may add some useless code around the picture. The only thing you will have to do it upload the picture with wordpress built in feature and name it ‘thumbnail’.

Read the rest of this entry »

Benoit Gilloz
Programmer, Research and Development