DoddemaGen

The move has kept us insanely busy.  Unpacking, painting, sorting, organizing, yard work, more painting, repairs…it almost feels like we bought the home but yet we’re just renting.  Loads of work needs to be done to actually call this place a “home”.

Sort of like all the work that needs to be done with this site.  My good friend, Mr Papa (Steve), is walking me through the process of moving all Gallery2 photos over to the new built-in WordPress gallery.  It’s one of my goals for this upcoming week.  Another goal is to work in inputting all the information that others have sent me.  It’s taken a long time to get everything situated and now with the new version of Legacy7, it should make things loads easier.

Another goal is to make the site more “accessible” to family.  Right now, I’m getting the feeling that people think that this is just my site and that they can’t participate.  I’m trying to find a way to change that.  Here’s what I’ve come up with….but not definite as of yet.

It’s called BuddyPress.  Here’s some sites to look at to get a better idea what it does: New BuddyPress theme and BuddyPress.  Why BuddyPress?  One of the things that I love about Joomla is one of their plugins called “Community Builder” where extended profiles can be made.  It shows your information such as name, interests and also adds recent photos that you’ve added and groups that you belong to.

Social networking is a hot thing right now with MySpace and FaceBook the leaders.  Personally I can’t stand MySpace and FaceBook just isn’t my thing.  This has potential.  This is where DoddemaGen could and should be headed….where everybody has their own space but yet all interconnected.

So…what do you say?  Should we consider it?

I apologize for not keeping up. I’ve been spending most of my time on DoddemaGen and the USS Riverside updating, overhauling, and just plain administering that I haven’t been having fun doing it. I recently received help from a new friend of mine, Assistanc3 (username). He’s an amazing graphic artist, CSS/HTML/PHP guru, and all around smart time. Nice thing is the guy literally doesn’t sleep for days on end. Why is that nice? He gets loads done!

dKret2 is perhaps my favorite theme of all time. It’s what you see every day that you visit this site. The built-in support for popular plugins, the customer service, the constant attention to detail make it a worthwhile theme in every possible sense. The the author added something else: the ability to add your own touches to it…basically your own skin.

Today was the first step taken to make our own skin using the dKret2 theme. My good friend, KimberleyJo, made this header in about 10-15 minutes on an old Win98 machine. She works miracles. So many thanks to her. Over the next several days, we’re going to see more changes as our skin progresses. The majority of the changes have to do with styles. I want this theme to look classic, elegant, an Old-World feel. I’m going to incorporate some styles from other themes that are available today and I believe we’re going to come up with something entirely unique, something we can call our own.

If you know anything about HTML or CSS and are willing to volunteer your time to help in this endeavor, please contact me! I’ll take all the help I can get.

I’m mentally preparing myself for the big overhaul at my main site: DoddemaGen. I’ll be upgrading WP to the latest and greatest 2.1.2 as well as switching themes. At this point, I think I’m going to continue to use dKret2 just because it is so easy to use and really requires little modification. It’s clean and I can have that 3-column look that I like if I desire.

Now I just require a change in graphics. I’m still trying to learn how to use the graphics software that I have so until then, grass might be the only header available. Anyways, should have everything done by tonight if all goes well.

I am currently at a dilemma regarding what I should use for a gallery. dKret2 utilizes myGallery while my site currently uses Gallery2. I haven’t seen much of myGallery and it is mostly a German site but the people over at dKret2 are very helpful. We’ll see how hard it is to modify G2 to work with the theme. If so, I’ll make myGallery work, especially since that piece of software doesn’t appear to have the troubles making lightbox/thickbox work. Time will tell.

Until next time, true believers.