Wordpress - a quick look

It is obvious that Wordpress is a very successful CMS (Content Managed System) and used by masses of people, therefore well past the time I should have a serious look at it.

It is very flexible, and has lots of features both free and small cost, developed around the world. However I am not convinced it is what I want. To develop quick sites I believe this can be done much easier with Weebly or Google Sites. To develop more sophisticated sites then I prefer to use native HTML5, CSS3, PHP and Jquery.

When developing more complicated sites I often find that you are trying all types of tricks to manipulate the CMS tool to do what you want, and you may just as well build it yourself. I also prefer to understand what my site does and not just understand the output.

So for the near future I will continue to use mainly HTML5 etc and Weebly.

Update

After writing this post I spent another couple of weeks giving WordPress a go, but in the end I was spending so much time trying to get it to do what I wanted when I could achieve same result in just a few minutes with native CSS and HTML. 

So I have archived site. 

Using Google Viewer to display PDF Files in your Web Site

I have been developing a site that contains several large PDF files. I wanted to have a quality version of the file for downloading and a lower quality for online viewing. The online version is a lower quality so that delay is minimised.
In doing this I discovered a few things.

• You can use Acrobat X to produce reduced size version that will start display the first page without waiting for the whole file to be made ready.
• All the browsers handle this file differently, and some not at all

I am using Weebly to build the site, and the Pro version has a feature to display PDF files using the viewer Scribd. THis is OK but appears to be Adobe Flash based, and it does not work on IOS (iPhone, iPad) platform. Therefore I looked for another approach. I noticed in testing the Google Chrome browser is that it uses its own Google Docs Viewer. This facility can be used in your own web sites.
This is the page being developed within Weebly Pro.

I want the Alternative Viewer called by the ONLINE QUICK button to use the Google viewer.

First you need to upload the PDF to Weebly. To do this I use the standard Weebly features to create a button and link this button to my PDF.

The file I uploaded is named in the File on Your Website. Copy this filename. Publish this site using standard Weebly methods and navigate to the page.

Clicking on the button will open PDF file as shown below (this may look different depending on browser). The online filename is given in the browser navigation box. Copy this name.

You now need to open another tab in your browser and go to docs.google.com/viewer where you paste the address of the PDF in the first box. Click on Generate Link

You should now see the following screen. There are options to embed the code into a HTML page, but the option I use is Paste this link into email or IM: Copy the link.

Return to Weebly development page edit the button so that it now links to the address we copied previously.

Again, using standard Weebly controls publish the site and visit the page. Now when you click on the QUICK ONLINE button you should see the following Google Viewer version of the PDF, which in my case opens in a new tab.

Real Example

If you want to see this in action then please visit The Orange Tree Press site. This company sells high quality greetings cards, mainly of a religious nature.

DIY Weebly Menu Bar

I am exploring Weebly in fine detail and one of the things I wanted to do was add a link button. Now I know that site navigation is well catered for by Weebly in its templates. However occassionaly I want to have a navigation link button embedded in the article or as an extra menu bar at the end of the page.

To see how I did this visit Web-Dev

 

 

Images not seen online but work on local disk - a solution

Having decided to use my trusted Total Commander to FTP my site I was developing with CoffeCup, see previous item, I was surprised to see photos not displayed after I had published to web. They worked OK when I was accessing pages on my local hard drive.

Agh, then I recalled similar problems in the past that had taken ages to resolve. I have my FTP options set to. Invert any upper case character in a file name to lower case when uploading. A quick edit changing all references to photos to lower case and upload new version and all OK again.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

CoffeeCup only publishes to the root - correction no it doesn't

Corrected post

The reason why I could not upload my website to my target folder was because I was using File - Upload File to Server when I should have been using My Websites - Upload Selected Files or My Websites - Upload Entire Website Project which send them to the folder you have defined as the root in the My Websites - Website Project Settings.

Original post

I use the excellent free Zymic hosting for testing my web developments. I need to have many folders to keep the various projects separate.

I have discovered that CoffeeCup HTML Editor insists on publishing index.html to the root file of my service. I tried for over an hour to get it to publish to my target folder to no avail and on googling discovered that it only puts this file in the root.

So I now publish to my local disk, well I di this anyway, and then use my trusty Total Commander from Ghisler to do FTP work.

Another inelegant solution but at least Total Commander is very fast.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad