With a few extra minutes this morning, I was able to attempt one more change to the code on this site to see if I could get it working the way I wanted to. As you can see, it works!!
Well, almost. I've noticed a few really little things that I need to fix, but considering the size of the previous problems I've had with the new layout, I don't think they'll give me too much trouble – I just need to find a little time to address them.
I learned some cool new stuff in developing this current theme, but with learning comes failure and frustration. I want to thank Ivovic, a member of the WordPress support forum who was persistent with me in helping to figure out what it was that I was doing wrong.
One thing I learned that is pretty cool is that having a user-level theme switcher is an extremely useful thing. It's not that I want to give the reader of the site a choice of themes, but it makes it easy to troubleshoot a theme without making it live. I developed this theme on a local machine with a web server set up for it, which makes things really nice because I could simply hit save in my editor, refresh in my browser, and see exactly what the world would see if it were a public site. The problem that I ran into was that the theme wasn't coded correctly, but was still working on the development site and when it was moved to this site the flaws became apparent. Having a user-level theme switcher enabled me to keep testing the changes and fixes without subjecting everyone to constant theme-switching during the process.
If you have a WordPress blog and enjoy creating your own themes, take a look at “The Loop” in the WordPress documentation. There are some pretty cool things you can do by manipulating the Loop, and having more than one (the default is one, most sites have only one). In this theme, I have four loops. The first posts that stuff at the top, under “echo zoe central”, which is a “Page” that I can edit very easily. The second posts the links to the three most recent podcast episodes (or it will when I get three or more episodes), the third posts excerpts from the five most recent articles (again, it will when I get five articles). The fourth and final loop posts the normal blog content, ignoring the “podcast” and “articles” categories. The Loop is what was giving me so much trouble over the weekend. If you try using more than one loop, be sure to follow the examples closely. Email me if you want more detailed assistance.
With all that, the new direction for Echo Zoe is here. I'm working on getting a new guest for the next podcast episode, I have a few in mind. I hope to have that posted by the seventh of June. If you listen to the current episode, leave a comment; I'm interested in how you like it.
