Protocol 7 WP Themes

decry.org was an irreverent, self-referential webzine that hit the ether in 2002, had a good run, fizzled out, and then just kind of sat there. The witty, self-depricating posts were lost in the poorly rendered archive and the front page was blank, devoid of any information about the site or useful wayfinding pointers. Truly, I had failed in my job as a Decry Pimp (my listed occupation on social networking sites).

Taking advantage of the weeklong summer vacation that just passed, I decided to don my pimp suit and get to work on decry.org. This post outlines the steps I went through, exporting from MovableType to WordPress, sketching concept ideas, building mock-ups in Photoshop, and finally creating a WordPress theme in XHTML 1.0 strict. Which is to say, this post is more for me than for you. Kind of like my tattoos…

In the beginning…

This is the first project that I really sat down and planned beforehand, complete with sketches of the main content, sub-pages, navigation, and icons. I was interested in going through all the steps to see how my ideas progressed at each stage, compared to my normal, more haphazard way of designing sites. And in the end, I have to say I really enjoyed the more thorough, planned approach; I found that when I finally got to the stage of writing the stylesheets and scripting the templates, things went much faster because of the prior planning. It was like following a map… I knew where I was going and I just had to type up the details.

Another reason for going through the full design process was because I had been reading a lot about designing on a grid. The always inspirational Khoi Vinh posted about the grid design behind subtraction.com, which really opened my eyes to what a grid can do for a design. markboulten.co.uk has a useful 5 part tutorial on grids that also came in handy. Which isn’t to say decry.org was strictly grid, but in the early stages that’s how it went, and I tried to stick pretty close to my early grid-based mockups.

The other driving force in the redesign was my nascent Illustrator skills… I finally know enough to make basic icons and decry provided the focus I needed to push myself into icon creation. It took me an evening of fiddling and futzing, but in the end I came up with seven icons I’m pretty happy with, though some of the categories were hard to abstract into an iconable image (greenlight/redcard?).

The icons, from left to right: Features, Interviews, Neal’s Fun Fact of the Day, Dispatches From, Bats Are Not Bugs, Ask Nica, Greenligh/Redcard.

Sketches sketched out, mock-ups mocked-up, and icons iconified, it was time to start pushing bits.

The problem with MovableType, and forays into MySQL

I don’t know if MovableType has changed in the years since I used it (circa 2002/2003), but the export options are atrocious. Mostly because there aren’t any options, simply a flat textfile export of the posts and comments combined. Which isn’t so bad until you consider the atrocious spam-filtering that MT “features”, and you can begin to see the problem. decry.org on MT was split into seven different blogs, covering each of the sections we had originally deemed necessary for our killer zine. The ‘Features’ section had the most posts, which also meant the most comments. For an estimiated one-hundred-and-something posts, there were 28,000+ spam comments, all of which had to be imported into WordPress. Importing the text files was a breeze thanks to WordPress’s built-in import function, though it did take quite a while thanks to the aforementioned and copious spam comments.

One complaint I have with WordPress is that their ‘mass edit’ mode for the comment section allows you to edit 20 comments at a time. This is hardly sufficient when dealing with 35,000+ comments, all of which you don’t want. Rather than click though the mass-edit page 1,750 times, I went straight to the MySQL command line and did some table manipulation there (I won’t get into the details here, but if you find yourself in the same position and need some guidance, feel free to contact me). Minutes later I was spam-free, and hopefully will stay that way if Akismet does for decry what it does for this site.

The decision to go with XHTML 1.0 strict wasn’t based on anything substantial, I just wanted to try it out. I validated along the way, so it wasn’t too painful to adhere to standards and I didn’t have much trouble, probably because decry.org doesn’t do anything fancy. Originally I had wanted to use this project to explore AJAX, but after numerous frustrating experiences with needless AJAX hindering my use of a site, I decided against it. Simple and clean was my goal for decry.org, and in that respect I think it does pretty well. The theme was built from the ground-up and rather uncomment worthy, though I did use the comment template from the default WordPress theme. I did depart from my usual flexible, bendy, em-based everything for an absolute layout and some pixel measurements, and surprisingly I’m okay with that. Also, the stylesheet is the cleanest, most organized stylesheet I’ve made in my life. I used the same structure as Veerle and really came off with something clean and navigable. Of course, it could be cleaner, but overall it’s pretty damn good (compare it to, say, the stylesheet for protocol7.net).

And in conclusion…

In the end I have a much better grasp on WordPress hooks and the anatomy of a template, refreshed my SQL skills, learned some new CSS tricks, and got some hands-on grid-based experience. There are still things about decry that I’m not happy with, and I’ll be working on those in the upcoming weeks (including copy to replace all the lorem-ipsum still running rampant). I don’t know if decry.org will see live content in the future, or remain in it’s current state as an archive for the writings of a group of twenty-something friends. I’m still going through the individual posts cleaning up the formatting, but if you have some time on your hands, feel free to browse the remnants of decry.org.