I was working on a web page where, in the past, the design was to use pop-up boxes. But pop-up boxes are so 1990s. Now, the thing is lightboxes. You’ve seen them. That’s when you get, essentially, a pop-up box on your screen, except it’s not another browser window and the web site in the background is often grayed out.

This page was a big table of information. First I tried using TablePress in a WordPress installation. But putting links in all those table cells was not going to happen. So I chucked that and found DataTables. It did the same kind of things as TablePress, but without the blog. And this way, I could put all the data into a real database and pull it that way, which was far superior.

Once the table part was done, there was the lightbox part. I tried Lightbox2 first, since I’d used that on a web site a decade ago. That failed quickly as it only does images and captions. I needed text in my lightboxes. I tried a couple others but had problems with them. I can’t even remember all the specifics, but they didn’t want to work easily. Certainly not as easily as DataTables did.

I found where people shared the code needed to program lightboxes, but they went on and on and on. If it was that complicated, I might as well use a program that someone has already written (which I’d already tried.)

And then I found this page from Superior Web Solutions, a Toronto web designer. They claimed their code was “the most simple way to code a Lightbox”, and boy is it.

I had some trouble with the code when I had too much content and it didn’t scroll, but I finally figured that out — they mentioned it in a comment that I hadn’t noticed. But the one thing missing was clicking on the background. I like my lightboxes where you can close the box by clicking outside of it and their code didn’t do that.

I struggled to try things to make that happen and came up short. Then I let my subconscious figure it out. It can do that a lot, especially with programming.

Out of nowhere, I had the solution. I added a global variable. It was so simple. All the times I tried to close the lightbox without knowing which one was open (I had a page with 308 lightboxes), all I needed was to know which was open. So I defined a global variable. When I opened the lightbox, I set the global variable to the lightbox number. I made the background box clickable and called the same display/hide function, but with the global variable instead.

Bingo.

So now I have the simplest lightbox code in the world, and it closes when you click the background. I’m a happy camper.

Go ahead. Try it. :-)

I’ve been doing a lot of web site work lately. I even have one site where the “boss” wants me to use website. I’ve been typing two words since the 1990s. Maybe someday I’ll switch.

I always set up WordPress in its own folder. Well, I guess that’s not really true for a couple of my sites now. I usually set up WordPress in its own folder. It keeps things cleaner. I don’t like tons of files in my root directory.

I just moved one site out from a folder to run in the root directory. I followed the directions from WordPress.org. It worked great.

The one part that didn’t work was the admin access. While that was still in the same place as before, the admin bar was missing, as were the edit links on the individual pages. I really like those links; it’s easier to find the pages I want with those most of the time. But WordPress didn’t know I was logged in anymore.

So I searched all over for the solution. How do I get it back? Did I have to move the login file or something? Nobody said anything. I searched through at least a dozen pages until I finally found someone who mentioned the problem and gave a far too simple solution. Ready?

Log out.

Log back in.

Oy vey. Problem solved. Now I’ll be ready for the other site when I finally get that one moved.

I have been working on a web site, written in PHP, that will need a translation. In programming, this is Internationalization, or I18N. I could easily write something that would check for the language variable and provide the alternate translation, but I wanted to do it correctly.

Yeah, I know, silly me, wanting to do something a little more complicated and using Windows for the development machine.

I decided to use gettext, because it seemed easy and it’s what WordPress uses, so I’d be more familiar with it when I get to it on a blog.

After fighting with it for a while and doing everything right but getting no results, I uploaded it to the server to test it out… and it worked perfectly.

The problem is that gettext doesn’t work in Windows. Sure, it seems to work, but setting the localization doesn’t work and there doesn’t seem to be any alternative way to set the localization to make use of the translations… so no way to actually see the translated text while in development in Windows. And I want to see it working.

I spent hours over two days searching the Internet for answers. So many answers… none ever worked.

Until I found this page: http://www.extradrm.com/blog/?p=1035

Thank you nameless person for finally providing a correct answer. And the correct answer is that the setlocale function of PHP does not work in Windows. Period.

But thanks to Danilo Segan, there is an alternate version of gettext that actually works in Windows, and that’s over here (https://launchpad.net/php-gettext/+download).

Now I can move forward with programming the project.

And I’m putting this blog post out here so that maybe the next person who goes searching all over the Internet for a solution will find this post and not waste as much time as me trying every which type of code and finding that none of them works.

And now my web site has a new design.

That was an adventure.

First, I had to back up the whole site to my computer. That wasn’t too hard.

Second, to get WordPress running on my computer. Also, not too difficult.

But getting the blog working on my computer was another story. I didn’t have a child theme before so I didn’t even try that; I just created a new child theme for the new design. But all of the images were broken because they were saved in the database with the URL instead of the URI. I never did try to fix that.

I brought most of the “static” pages into the blog, but moving the whole blog to not be in the “blog” folder just broke everything. Oh well. I’ve set up forwarding from the old pages.

Setting up the menu and the widgets was easy, but had to be done manually on the live site how I set up the test site on my computer.

And finally, I had to figure out how to do my custom header. I created nine headers of three designs and want each to show up for the “static” pages, the blog, and the nitpicker. After a few mistakes, I got that working too. I was going to put in a random number generator, but for now I’ll leave it with each showing the same background. I can change it later.

And so, a new design. I’m happy with it. Stephen’s site was easier; I did that in a day. Mom’s will be next. I hope hers is easy like his was. And then to finish the JGIRC search engine. And deal with the UJGS member stuff.

And I have to remember to change the media file. I keep forgetting to hack that. Apparently, hacking the theme breaks the built in gallery….. There, better. Well, that left something a little wrong, but it’s close enough for me now. Web site update finished. On to other things.

I’ve spent the past several days learning about WordPress and how it all works. Why?

1. I’ve wanted to integrate the blog into my site since I went public with it.
2. A potential new client wants a blog, along with everything else he’s asked for, and it was recommended to me to just use WordPress for the whole site as my content management system.

So here it is! My site and my blog should now fit together perfectly. I went ahead and added things like a Twitter feed, some “share this” buttons, and my surname list (using WP tags, actually). If you see any problems, let me know. I’ve tested in Firefox and IE8.

Now, I have some genealogy research to do.