I’ve switched to the Tarski Wordpress theme for both this and my personal blog. Thanks to Jordan for the tip on the theme and for helping me to get up to speed quickly. I think Tarski is a nice theme with a reasonable set of configurable options. Being able to easily specify a custom style sheet is a big plus. With a couple of lines of css, I was able to widen my page enough to fit most of my code snippets.

After the theme switch, I took some time to reduce my category list considerably and use tags in place of the deleted categories. I also added category counts to provide some useful feedback.

Comments Plugin

Thanks to a comment on Jordan’s blog, I grabbed a simple plugin to change the text that’s displayed when there are no comments from “No comments” to “Add a comment”. The former could imply that “no comments are allowed” vs. “no comments exist yet”.

Just drop the following code in wp-content/plugins/change_no_comments.php and activate the plugin in the admin UI:

<?php
  /*
  Plugin Name: Change Comment Text
  Plugin URI:  http://tarskitheme.com/
  Description: Change comment text to something else.
  Author:      Benedict Eastaugh
  Version:     1.0
  Author URI:  http://extralogical.net/
  */

  function change_no_comments_text($text, $number) {
    if (0 == $number) { $text = 'Add a comment'; }
    return $text;
  }
  add_filter('comments_number', 'change_no_comments_text', 10, 2);
?>

Wordpress as a CMS

Next I’ll be testing the boundaries of Wordpress as a general purpose CMS. My initial assessment is that even though I much prefer Ruby over PHP as a programming language, the maturity, ease of use, feature richness, availability of documentation & developers, etc. of Wordpress outweighs the disadvantages of the implementation language for a large set of clients.

http://adkinsgroup.org/blog/2007/04/07/let-the-blogging-begin/