I’m back from vacation. I had a mountain of mail, voice mail, and email waiting for me at work this morning. I spend a whole week recharging my batteries and they’re drained after the first day. But I had good time in Tucson and, as expected, JWalk and Pamn were excellent hosts. The weather was absolutely outstanding while I was down there. I must have brought it back with me, because Sunday was about as nice a day as you can expect in Omaha. It was eighty degrees, sunny, and no wind. That’s not a very common combination.

One thing I didn’t do on my trip was think about Excel. I worked with a lot of php and css stuff. One project that I played with on vacation was my company’s website. The content isn’t complete yet, but I wanted to get the css nailed down. I’m trying to use WordPress as a content management system, rather than a blog. I have three or so static pages on the site, and the rest of the pages will be project pages: basically the same information for each project and some photos. The original site is at www.paragonconstructioninc.com (I didn’t design it, so feel free to make fun of it) and the one on which I’m working is at www.paragon.revise.org (Thanks to my buddy Jeff at Revisemedia for helping me out yet again). I did “design” the latter, so be gentle when you make fun of that one.

The five pieces of project data in the project “posts” are in custom fields and the photos are in the main content section of the post. (There’s only one “post” with photos in it right now.) I’ve rearranged single.php, page.php, and archive.php from the default theme. I took all the stuff that would make it look like a blog instead of just a static site. The plugins I’m using are

• Get custom field values – to produce the unordered list of project data. I can’t use the_meta because it sorts it alphabetically and I can’t seem to change that.
• Page to Front – to make one of my static pages replace index.php.
• RunPHP – which runs php from within a WP page or post. My Project Portfolio page has php to list the categories. Super WP guys would have made their own php file, but I like this better.

Okay, I’ll quit boring you with php and css crap, but if you want to see how I hacked the default theme, you can see my butchery by downloading pciphp.zip. Now, I’ll bore you with Excel stuff starting again tomorrow.