Improvements
James Bylett July 1st, 2009
Not a very interesting update really and not related to photography at all (unless you’re particularly interested in website design you’ll probably want to stop reading about now!), but I’m feeling quite pleased with the improvements I’ve made to the site at the moment and I haven’t written many blog posts in a while so thought I’d write about it anyway.
My site has changed it’s layout a few times since I created it, mainly due to expanding content, but a problem I’ve long suffered with was that, when it came to galleries with multiple pages, the way I was doing it was, frankly, a bit of a mess. I used to have to create seperate pages for each part and then hide the automaticly created links, create manual hyperlinks where I wanted them between the pages and sub pages etc. in order to get it all linked together properly while still keeping the site looking neat and tidy to visitors. While this looked fine on the surface, it has been starting to get pretty tedious as it meant a lot of manual work every time I added a page to an existing gallery set, meant I had multiple pages named the same in my page list (which made my navigation of pages for editting purposes very confusing at times!), and the sheer number of pages I had to wade through was starting to get a bit silly given how many galleries I have!
I’ve trid to solve this problem in the past with plugins but never managed to find one that would achieve what I really wanted, sets of pages joined together with links between them created automatically to save me so much manual work. I’ve finally managed to achieve this, not with a plugin, but with a feature that I hadn’t even realised was built in to wordpress all along, a simple tag to split a page into multiple pages (<!–nextpage–> in case anybody reading this has had similar issues with a site to me). OK it wasn’t quite that simple, I also had to look up a bit of code that needed inserting into my page templates in order to display the page navigation links, plus figuring out where to put it was interesting (bit of a trial and error job, I’m an amateur coder at best so the majority of my code customisations over the years have been a similar routine!) but after getting over that hurdle the rest was plain sailing.
In many ways it’s highly annoying knowing that the feature was there all along staring me in the face and I just never found it, but equally I’m extremely pleased now I’ve implemented it that I’ve managed to kill dozens of pages from the site by compiling them all into single split pages with all the links created autmatically for me (well, all apart from the links between the photo and slideshow pages but that’s a product of the way I’ve designed that and it’s no effort to maintain), making for a much better organised back end to the site and a much easier job for me to make future updates to it!
Anyway, geeky post over, I’ll try to make the next one more photography related and a bit less boring 
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