KMFstudio

Just a not for myself, a couple of plugins of wordpress that I would like to check out when I have the time

Recent posts plugin

Related entries

Ultimate tag warrior

in-series. to create series of articles 

One of the first irks I found on WP2.0 is the small thumbnailsize. Maximum 128px width.

So I digged around and found that by changing one small line in wp-admin/admin-functions.php this can be fixed.

Just open the file and search for
$max_side = apply_filters( ‘wp_thumbnail_max_side_length’, 128, $attachment_id, $file );
and change it to
$max_side = apply_filters( ‘wp_thumbnail_max_side_length’, 250, $attachment_id, $file );
and you get bigger thumbnails. I chose 250 because I find that the best width to view thumbs.

Now I just need to rewrite that thumbnail-create function in a way to use imagemagick… because, let’s face it GD-produced images are not nice….

Winter Blue (2004)
This is the first theme used for AsianFanatics. It was made in quite a hurry because AF was just launched and we just had no theme. It got built up while we’re working.

Spring Green (2004)
After considering for awhile, we’ve decided to use a more catchy, unique colour to use for our themes, and in comes Spring Green. My initial ideas is to have 4 kind of themes for each season of the year.
2004 Macintosh theme.
For the rest of the year, I didn’t had time to make another theme and knowing that the forum software is about to be upgraded which will disable all the old themes, I just decided to use a free stock theme that looked nice. In comes the Macintosh Theme.
Orange (2004-2005)

After an upgrade of AF’s forumsoftware, the old themes weren’t working anymore. And in a hurry I just played around with a auto-theme generator and had this orange theme for awhile.

2005-1 Dull Blue

Besides the orange theme. I also changed the default theme of the forum software a bit. Actually, only the logo was changed and the colours were brightened up a bit.

2005-2006 AF-reloaded

The orange theme just looked really bad, so I had to create a new one. This time, I spent more thoughts on how to make a “friendly” theme for AF. It has to be unique, but also playful, to really show that AF is a free for all place. In comes the AF-reloaded theme. Especially the topics view are unique with speech boxes to represent that the text was made by the posters themselves. This theme was launched near the end of 2005 and used for almost the entire 2006. It even worked after a full upgrade of the forum software (quite robustly designed)

2006 Spring Green evolution

The forum was seperated from it’s subsites now. We have subsites for the gallery, the newspage, etc. Because the AF-reloaded theme was a tables-based design and tableless design was promoted more and more, I’ve ventured my way upon our first tableless design, colours based heavily on Spring Green. However, it was far from perfect and never was used for the forum itself.

2006 (4th quarter)-2007 Ambience Blue

With AF’s growth, there was a growing need for advertising space that we can rent out. I’ve also wanted a true tableless design that can be used for all subsites AND the forum, to connect them together. In comes the Ambience Blue theme. The fixed width and sidebar allowed much more efficient use of screen space. But it’s far from finished and a new updated version is around the corner….

I always had plans to create a multi-subject content site. There are just too many subjects I want to talk about, but I was missing the tools to create so. I’ve been working on my own multisite-cms because I think that the common opensource cms are not fit for my goal. But creating your own multisite CMS-system is not an easy task if you have a fulltime job too.

So I’ve decided to make use of wordpress to at least get the content sites started, while I can work on my own CMS in the meantime.
I’ve setup a site with one single installation of WP.

This setup has these requirements:

1. Depending on the subdomain, chose the correct site.
2. If a subdomain is not valid (blablabla.domain.com) show the default site
3. Uploads are seperated into sites
4. Themes and plugins are shared
5. Each site can have it’s own theme and other configurations
6. All sites are sharing one user database
7. One user login into one (sub)site, (s)he will be logged in to all.

Here’s how I did it:

Changed files

• wp-settings.php
• capabilities.php
• wp-config.php

Added files

• sites_config.php

Read the rest of this entry »

Last christmas I finally fully enjoyed the pleasure of using e-tickets and online booking at Cathay Pacific. I’ve been using e-tickets before, but back then, I was not able to use the online checkin option yet. It was not available for my country (holland).

Anyway, last christmas was the first time I was able to use e-ticket online checkin and it’s great. Granted, I’ll lose the chance to be upgraded to a business class seat, but I’ve flown a dozens of times, but only got upgraded once…

It has many pro’s though. When using online checkin (24 hours before departure), I can chose my own seats in advance (the bulkhead seat are usually unavailable already, but they’re not that comfortable anyway) and I can also use the express bagage dropqueue at the airport.

In practice it means I can prevent having to go to the airport 3 hours in advance hoping to get the seats I wanted and also not having to queue up for over an hour to get myself checked in. I only had to drop my bagage. The queue for the online checkedins didn’t took longer than 5 minutes (only 3 people in front of me).

Everytime I go to Hong Kong for holiday I tend to fly with Cathay because it’s one of the two long-haul non-stop companies in Holland. But most importantly, because I will arrive early in the morning in Hong Kong and when I go back, it’ll be past midnight.

This way, I’ll be able to ‘add’ 2 extra days to my holiday for free. Also, this is the best way to fight jet-lag. You attempt to sleep for a bit in the plane, and when you arrive it’s broad daylight. The same happens when you go back. Only thing is…. sleeping on aircraft is still a pain. Literally.

I thought it would be good to open up a new blog with the start of a new year. I’ve left this domain unused way too long. It’s always good to have at least have some content in it, even though it’s just a wordpress-site.