OneFreeVoice

Upgrade Woes
Okay, So I forgot to add the structure and adminitration grants back to the wordpress mySQL user on my machine. It was a pretty innocent mistake. You know it right away, because the upgrade script throws a bunch of errors when it’s trying to make tables. You add the grants and run the upgrade script. No big deal right?

Well, evidently it *is* a big deal. This newer version of wordpress has a new table “usermeta” that is supposed to get populated with some data during the upgrade. One piece of data - the user capabilities - controls what a user can do in the system and is pretty critical. Without it, you get no links in the admin panel, and if you try to navigate to any particular pages within the admin area you get a nasty permission denied error.

Fortunately for me, enough people have been having this problem that it was easy to find a fix. Once I figured out what was supposed to go in there, I was able to stick it in via the backend. But talk about a major pain in the butt.

Design Considerations
I’ve wanted to upgrade my wordpress install for a while, but I was kind of hanging back because I wanted to do a new theme at the same time. I started this about a month ago, but it kind of fell to the wayside with everything else going on.

It’s not that I hated my old theme - Oscilloscope. I was just getting tired of it. It was very flat looking, and the blue-grey background was a little dull. I wanted something maybe a little warmer, and I’d been thinking about some new css tricks I’ve picked up since then.

The main idea behind this theme actually came from a comment that Dave Harding made back when I was working on the layout for gnujersey. He was talking about read-ability, and specifically about the number of characters per line and how newspapers are easier to read because the right-to-left scan distance is short (that’s where you go from the end of one line of text to the beginning of the next).

Well, this is obviously a problem on the web, because you never really know how wide a user’s browser window is going to be, or what their default font-size is going to be, or a myriad of other factors on the web that can alter number of characters per line.

But I remembered something that Eric Meyer discussed at An Event Apart in Philly. He talked about fully em-based layouts, and controlling flowing web pages based on text size. Basically, 1 em is equal to the end user’s default font size. So if your browser default is 16 pixels, then 1em is equal to 16 pixels. So I basically figured out how many ems I would need to maintain my left-hand links without rapping, and how many ems would give a decently readable block of text, and I built the site accordingly. The main content area is 45ems, with the sidebar being 12ems and the post area being 29ems (there are 4ems of space). So roughly, if you’ve got the browser default of 16px font size, the site is going to be about 720px wide. Obviously, if your default font size is only 10px, it’s going to be a lot narrower than that.

You can play around with this pretty easily if you’re using Firefox. Just hold down the control key and hit plus and minus a few times, and you’ll see the width of the content window shrink/expand with the text. It will break at unreasonably large or unreasonably small font sizes, but for the most part, it’s suprisingly consistent.

I also decided to try out having all the links on the left instead of the right. I’m not sure I like that yet - but I want to give it time. I’m also planning to add some additional pages in the top bar (when I get time).

I hope you like it.