Rip It Up And Start Again

I’ve just finished putting the changes I’ve been making to this site live. The front page is now an integration of my latest blog post, a random image from my gallery and a short bio of myself.

Getting the latest post was explained well by this post and boils down to including the WordPress header file and calling query_posts() with the appropriate search criteria, from there it is a simple matter of making use of The Loop and Template Tags, just like when creating a theme. I was getting an error here, mentioned on this forum, depending on where abouts I included the header but solved it by declaring: global $wpdb, $wp, $wp_rewrite, $wp_query; before the require statement.

Displaying a random gallery image required the use of the ImageBlock module and thankfully was painless. The whole visual aspect of this kind of thing continues to perplex me and I’m thankful for tools like colour wheels which have come in handy. I’m still aware that this site has that “designed by a programmer” look and lacks a degree of finesse, but if I was a designer I probably wouldn’t be a programmer!