The BrainDonor Network has a new home in the cloud! I have moved everything from Slicehost to Amazon Web Services. With Rackspace finally pushing through the migration of server images from Slicehost to the Rackspace Cloud, I knew I had the perfect opportunity to switch. Having deployed several client sites to AWS, I also knew I had the comfort level to get everything migrated and set up—so that I could start ignoring it once again.
Welcome to the new and improved Braindonor Network. As you can see, I have completely updated the WordPress theme of this site. There are still some rough edges—but I liked the new theme so much that I was not willing to wait until everything was completely polished. The new theme is a combination of the barebones Sandbox theme and Twitter’s Bootstrap.
One of the more interesting challenges I have faced with WordPress is offering custom pages. These could be pages such taking a survey, asking a question, or suggesting a topic. Previously, I had gone about coding these kinds of pages by just sticking the php file in the web root. The problem with that strategy is twofold. The page cannot be disabled without going to the file system. The page also doesn’t respect theme changes cleanly.
I have a friend that wants to update a banner on his WordPress blog homepage without changing the template files. I tell him I’d be glad to help him out and start working on a plugin that provides a custom administration page to allow for this. As I am a firm believer in the power of a lazy coder to get things done faster and better, my first thought was: “Why don’t I just see if I can hijack the ‘Select Image From Gallery’ page to do this?” that process for my own ends shouldn’t take me but a few minutes…and a lot less time than trying to build my own media selector. Like nearly all the content on my site, if you are reading this, I wasn’t able to find my answer elsewhere.
Once again, my WordPress friends had to hit me up for some help. These are the same friends that I helped with a Custom Field Search Plugin. They have been maintaining a community site, SuccessNet Online™, and an email mailing list of several hundred thousand participants for Business Networking International.
In my previous post on implementing a custom field search in WordPress, I showed how to modify the internal SQL LIKE search that is the default search engine of WordPress. There are other search engines that WordPress can make use of, most notably Sphinx Search.
Some friends of mine that have started offering custom WordPress designed sites and consulting hit me up a couple of weeks ago for some help. They had a site for a client that was utilizing custom fields to provide some additional CMS-like functionality to WordPress and had hit a snag. Their custom fields were not being searched.
The new Braindonor Network site is up and running! I took down the static place-holder page that I have been running for about five years and finally have some content for general consumption.