A Wordpress theme (and plugin) for web profiles...

Tinkering around with Wordpress, I came up with two things which might benefit other users:

1. SL Mini Blog - A Wordpress plugin which displays your blog with an alternative theme only when the SL web tab browser is detected. It can also strip images or replace them with links if so desired.
   
2. Kubrick SL - A cute, 400px wide version of Kubrick, the default Wordpress theme. Fits perfectly in the web tab browser and is good to use with the above plugin.
   

You can of course make 400px wide Wordpress themes of your own to use with this plugin.

Nothing to really get excited about. I just figured some people could use it to break out of horizontal scroll bar hell.

[Screenshot]
[Blog entry & download page]

This is not for people with freebie accounts at wordpress.com btw.
AFAIK, they don't allow you to upload themes and plugins.

OMG I love you. Thank you so much for this.

Heh! Thanks Shinesse. I've had a couple of thanks in-world, so definitely worth making available even if only a handful of people could use it.

oo lovely. I spent many hours tweaking the Minimalistica theme until I squeezed my DollyRock blog into the web profile window, this would have saved me a lot of time. Nice job

Can you save me some beating around the bush on this? I have a freebie wordpress.com account. I would like to upgrade to the kind of account that lets me add plugins such as your wonderful addition. Do I go to wordpress.org to do that? I was there recently but guess i missed the action item.

Thanks,
MarkTwain White

Sorry. That disclaimer was misleading. As far as I know, it's not possible for any wordpress.com account holder to upload themes or plugins without them passing a security audit first. And there are so many account holders that stuff like this is unlikely to ever be considered.

Since wordpress.com officially launched last year, a lot of people think that's what 'Wordpress' is. In actual fact, Wordpress is a (very popular) personal publishing platform that predates wordpress.com, and people have been installing it on their own servers or webhosting accounts for years. (Wordpress.com just opens it up to a wider audience I guess, but with considerable limitations.) I use bluehost.com to host my Wordpress blog...and I believe Torley Linden just switched to dreamhost.com. Many hosts (certainly bluehost) have a control panel feature called 'fantastico' that lets you do a point and click install of Wordpress without even having to bother downloading it from wordpress.org and uploading with FTP. I believe you get a free domain name with the aforementioned hosts too. When you run Wordpress like this (the traditional way) you can use whatever themes and plugins you want.

Sorry I couldn't help you more MarkTwain.

very cool!

i'm building a site in Textpattern and wasn't even aware that there is a SL web broswer.

to achieve a similar thing, do i need to mess around with CSS as i would do to hide certain elements for print?

cheers,

Lhor

That's right Lhorentso. It's a Gecko based browser and as long as your page is no more than 400px wide, it should look great. I previewed my scaled down version of Kubrick in Firefox while working on it because it formats pages identically.

Shinesse - I think you've misunderstood what this plugin does, and I'm so sorry to disappoint you because you were so pleased originally. It basically allows your blog to have two themes -- one for the Second Life browser, and another for all other browsers out there (IE, FF, etc.). It doesn't scale your existing blog theme down to 400pixels wide when Second Life is detected -- rather it loads an alternative theme according to the options you set when you followed step 4 of the installation instructions (which assumes you want to use the Kubrick SL theme when Second Life is detected).

If you look at my blog for example, you'll see that the Second Life web browser applies the Kubrick SL layout, but a regular browser displays it with a completely different theme. That should change shortly because I'm working on a 400pixel wide version of my existing (regular browser) theme.

Again. Really sorry.

Oh that's not a problem that it doesn't use my theme. I don't mind that its not my theme I'd rather a readable theme. Right now it won't show anything at all. I get a blank page for some reason.

'doh I think I know what to do to fix it. I'm having a blonde moment. Now that I know its not my theme but the Kubrick theme included in the download I think I should be able to fix it. My bad.

edited to add:
Wootage I got it to work. Now if I could just figure out how to get the images not to scale over to the links I'll be good to go. For now I've just used the option to leave them as a link. Which was a great idea btw.

My joy still remains...you rock!!!

Ah my bad, but excellent, you sorted it. I'm going to implement an option that lets you scale images by a set amount, but I'm slightly busy at the moment, so it'll probably be the end of the week before it's done. And thanks for the feedback. You rock too Miss!

O thats neat, can anyone help me, I have my blog here http://sensualdesigns.wordpress.com/ and I would like to host it on www.lecadrenetwork.com How would I do that? and how would I add the plugins? can anyone help me?

Superb work Dillon! Works brilliantly for me and I've added your site to my blog-roll.

Lowell

I had a quick look. The font size when looking at your web tab is painfully small to read. is that a fixable issue at all?

I'm back. Firstly, I just made v0.2 available. The main difference is: It now lets you scale images down by a percentage of their original size. Go to the options page after installing and you'll notice the new entry. This should stop content breaking due to oversized images...or just make you happier if you previously stripped images altogether.

Sensual, you would have to install Wordpress on your own server. If it's administered via an interface called 'Cpanel', clicking the 'Fantastico' icon, locating Wordpress in the list of available scripts and performing a one-click install is the simplest way to do it. As for migrating posts across...erk...not sure about that. I'd have to check up on it. (I think Torley recently wrote about migrating posts from one blog to another.) Certainly, installing the plugin is very easy once you're hosting your own Wordpress blog. (Hosting it yourself is worth it for the extensibility options alone in my opinion.)

If you don't have Cpanel & Fantastico...well, you have to download Wordpress yourself (http://wordpress.org/download/), and follow the installation instructions linked to the download page. Make sure you host meets the minimum requirements first: http://wordpress.org/about/requirements/.

Lowell: Thanks! I linked back to you too.

And Warda: I agonized over the font-size after converting the theme due to the trade-off between readability and ugly line-wrapping in the side-bar. There is an easy way to scale the font-size globally though. Open the style.css file (part of the Kubrick SL theme) and immediately below the comments at the top, you'll notice these three lines:

 
/* Begin Typography & Colors */
body {
font-size: 50%;

Just change the font-size percentage according to your preference.

I'd like to convert some single-column Wordpress themes down to 400px wide because they'd be far easier to read in SL than a two-column theme like Kubrick. It's just finding the time to do it though.

Just to let you know...I've now created a single column version of the Kubrick SL theme which means the font-size is more flexible without compromising other content. Images fit better too. All available here, of course.

I'm failing to connect to your web site (looks like it is never finding it in DNS) though my net connect is working everywhere else I go.

Since stumbling accidentally into the web profile feature, been trying to get our WP powered site to display there; it seems to render always sans the CSS (we reference one style sheet for media=screen versus another for media=print), so I'm looking for the WP hook that tells it to use your custom CSS (was hoping to DL your plugin too find this out).

What sort of earth moving act would it take for LL to provide an in-world LSL command to invoke this browser with a passed URL as a parameter? I could wait for HTML on a prim if we had an easier way to bring up this mini browser that is sitting there in the client software and little-used. Hacking the settings.xml I know about, but beyond the techie crowd, few are going to manage that task.