Wed, 13 Aug 2008

Ai De website upgraded, too

I finally got round to upgrading Wordpress and K2 (to 2.6/RC 7, respectively) for the Ai De website, too. The old version of K2 had caused errors when you did certain things, e.g. clicked on "Older" to see, uh, older posts; so the website hadn't been fully functional for several months. The reason I didn't upgrade earlier was that I knew this wouldn't be a completely trivial thing. I had made some changes to two PHP files of K2 - header.php and sidebar.php, and of course these files were among those which had been changed by the authors of K2 as part of the upgrade. So I had to incorporate my changes into the new files.

This took me quite a while, but turned out to be much more straightforward than I had anticipated. What really kept me working on the upgrade for hours, though, was the fact that the header part of every page (which displays the blog title, blog description, header image and navigation) is apparently put together in a different way from before - with the result that the upper part of my header image disappeared under the title/description/calligraphy part. I tried a few CSS tricks (position: absolute etc.) but didn't get anywhere. Eventually I realised that doing just 2 simple things might solve the problem: adding 60 pixels of empty space to the top of my image and inserting a line into my extra stylesheet to override the standard height of the image, which is set in the stylesheet which comes included with K2 (#header { height: 260px; }). I was lucky - it works.

Since I still haven't found a way to put one of my narrow columns to the left of the main column in the new K2, the Ai De website has one single sidebar now instead of two. I placed the list of categories and the RSS feeds below the search window, archives and links. It's not as good as before but still OK.

Posted on 13 Aug 2008 at 18:17 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink