I upgraded to WordPress 2.0 today and created a new theme.

The upgrade was really simple and it looks like there were no problems. Not quite sure what I’ll get with the upgrade but the feature that sold me was the better management pages (you don’t see those, they are what I use to write new content and create categories and other stuff). The downside is that the spell checker I was using reportedly doesn’t work with this version. There are other spell check modules available, so I’m not too worried.

Also created a new theme, even though it probably wasn’t required. Had a couple of hours of time available and I really am starting to understand this CSS stuff. It looks sort of similar to the old theme, but works much better with Internet Explorer under Windows. I also got the Calendar and other nice features going on the left side bar.

Once again my WordPress experience is very positive.

I’ve slowly started to clean up things in the presentation. I still don’t fully grasp style sheets with layout so things continue to be an odd mix of CSS and traditional HTML attributes for my tables. Probably will sort it out sometime in the future, as right now the presentation is good enough even if the underlying code is not.

Got Gallery back online too. Click on the little camera picture in the upper right corner to enter the photo gallery section. If you know the old bobandileen.com site then you’ll recall that I had created my own gallery database but sort of “forgot” to keep updating it. In the meantime there is something like a bazillion different gallery implementions available and many of them are really nice. I settled on Gallery2 and I’m extremely happy with it.

Also managed to get the Archives page working but there are still some ugly presentation issues to sort out. Sigh. Next up will be the Contact page.

Eileen had recently checked in on my progress but didn’t notice that the Photos link was attached to the camera picture. So I added some clickable text below the graphic with the hope that visitors will discover one or both of the links.

I typically don’t enable comments for my posts. This is for two reasons: I don’t think very many people (if any) know that I’ve started writing new articles for this site, and I don’t want to have to figure out how to deal with spammers and other lower forms of life filling up comments with crap. But someday I will probably switch my thinking on this.

Eileen says she wants more help getting her site configured, so that will be a focus for several hours this weekend I’m certain.

I started a few weeks ago to install and configure Mambo here at bobandeileen.com. Before long I realized that Mambo (or Joomla, if you prefer) does way more than I’m interested in doing here. Ditto for Drupal and many other “portals”. As a result of doing more, those sorts of tools require more time for setup and more energy for long-term maintenance. So a new search began for something lightweight, secure and yet useful for a “personal portal”. I stumbled into WordPress after looking at least three other weblog tools that seemed promising (thanks Google). I was immediately drawn to WordPress because of its sense of style. The details are polished, and while those other packages were functional, this one looks and really feels great.

So now I’m in the process of setting up WordPress and I also have to reconfigure Gallery2 as it looks like I might have deleted too much stuff on the webserver. :^)

More later as I get set up here. By the way, I also installed WordPress for Eileen over at her site although she hasn’t quite got things configured beyond some simple things (I helped tweak a theme that she liked).