All comment stuff is done through “calling”: comments_template.php

THEN: editing comments.php … that is, through there, you can edit and so on, the formatting of the comments etc.
Interesting Plugins that should be used:

Using Gravators with your comments:
http://zenpax.com/gravatars2/
(FYI: Gravators.com –> and their native plugin for Wordpress … check it out!)
Author Highlite –>
http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/AuthorHighlight
Recent Comments –>
http://blog.jodies.de/archiv/2004/11/13/recent-comments/

1) create well integrated pages (about, manifesto etc)

2) create good templates for those pages — different than the main page!
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Have been using a plugin for feeds (feedlist), so I can pull in del.icio.us RSS into the “sidebar”.

Since it appears quite versatile, I wonder whether I can pull in the magnolia feed?

So multiple loops are a must if you want to be able to display any data at all from your wordpress database.

Again, the referral is here for the codex entry.

And, I have accomplished it!

The side pain features “Featured Posts” — in actuality, its just the posts from “Computers” category, and the latest 4 posts.

The Loop is actually demystified if you basically think about it as 1) you querying the wordpress database 2)scrolling throuhg all of the results — which are all records, and the output of that query is a “loop” of records.

well, I deleted the OLD ‘below the fold’ stuff — basically it was a clumsy way of doing it.

Mostly because it basically did “The Loop”, but after a single post (the latest), it then changed the format of subsequent posts to “excerpts”, and through the magic of styling and divs, changed the format of THOSE to a different location (”below the fold”) as well as a different style.

Its clumsy, because if you SEARCH for different items, your results will ALSO end up the same way; the first item will be okay, but the rest of your search results will be styled “below the fold” — which is REALLY supposed to be for INDEPENDENT, footer-type items … latest posts, latest links, a detailed “about” and so on.

Therefore, a new “below the fold” is the following:

1) truly independent, and in the “footer.php”
2) will include the following items, independent of whats above the fold:
a) latest entries / popular entries
b) latest “news” (aka magnolia or delicious entries)
c) blog roll — popular other blogs
d) a true footer

To accomplish this, you fundamentally need to sort out the trick to get multiple loops on the same page.

Why? The latest series of posts above the loop — that’s loop #1. The last series of entries below the loop, to show up on every single page independently of what’s above the loop (it could just be headlines a la “crate“) is loop #2.

The Codex has what seems to be a good explanation of how to do more than one loop AND be able to select which posts to select IN that loop:

http://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop#Multiple_Loops

(I don’t know if there’s going to be a part II … )
But, Wordpress has an interesting way of dealing with “control structures” — that is, ifs, whiles, etc etc.

Although you can add “tags” to create and modify pages (and The Loop), at its heart, it MUST adhere to the rules of PHP — because that’s how Wordpress is built upon.

Therefore, its curious how it deals with its control structures, because THERE ARE NO CURLY BRACKETS!

That is, when you usually use an “IF”, the actual stuff which follws the operator is usually enclosed in curly brackets!

To wit: (more…)