Friday, June 24, 2011

Widget Madness

Here's some advice for you if you're trying to set up your own website.  If someone tries to tell you Wordpress is easy you should slap them.  Hard.  Or maybe Wordpress is easy and all the other programs are even worse.  All I want to do is set the thing up so you click on the thingy at the top of the page that says, 'Home' or 'Services' or 'Contact Us' and it takes you to a page with the appropriate information.  It should not take me days and weeks and years to figure this out.  The trouble with this stuff is that there's specific words for everything and I don't know what they mean.  A post is different from a page and how you get the page to show up when you type in the website address instead of the post is beyond me.  Thankfully Jonny told me the name of the thingy you click that says 'Home' or 'Services' or 'Contact Us' is 'tab'.  I'm not sure how I was supposed to know that or how I was even supposed to ask Wordpress that or how Jonny knows it and I'm probably the only person on the face of the planet that doesn't.  Not that this information is useful.  It's only brought me to a different level of Hell.

"Tabs and Slides (in post/page) Plugin gives you the ability to easily add content tabs and/or content slides. The tabs emulate a multi-page structure, while the slides emulate an accordion-like structure, inside a single page!"

Accordion-like structure, inside a single page!  I'm glad someone is so excited about it.  Jonny is no help here.  And this is their idea of easy.

This section describes how to install the plugin and get it working.
  1. Upload folder wordpress-tabs-slides to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
  2. Activate the plugin through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress.
  3. Test and enjoy!

Usage

Shortcode
Tab:
{tab=Tab Title} Contents {/tabs}
or
{tab=Tab 1}
Contents Tab 1
{tab=Tab 2}
Contents Tab 2
{/tabs}
Slide: {slide=Slide Title} Contents {/slide}
Accordion-like structure(1.8): {accordion=Accordion 1} Contents {/accordion} {accordion=Accordion 2} Contents {/accordion}

Easy as pie.  My ass.  Now I have to research where to find the wordpress-tabs-slider folder and also where to find the /wp-content/plugins/ directory to upload it to.  Then what do you do?  This goes on and on and on for everything.  Hours and hours to figure out how to insert a photo in a sidebar and then how to make the sidebar different for each different page.  I got the plug-in for that one but how I get it to work is probably another day's research.

And after all that?  Turns out all  I had to do was actually publish the page and it automatically created a tab on the menu.  The tab doesn't say what I want and it's not on the first page but at least we're getting somewhere though where we are getting I'm not so sure.  Easy as pie.  I had a stomach bug the past 2 days and didn't mess with the website while I was ill.  I'm sort of longing for the stomach virus to return.

I have a USDAA trial on Sunday only.  I'm thinking the International Jumpers course will be a piece of cake compared to all this.  I'm not even going to complain about how hot it is.

Agility is way more fun than computers.  Humans are so stupid.


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5 comments:

  1. Greg S7:12 PM

    Elayne, this is why people pay me to set this stuff up for them :)
    A couple months ago I setup the website http://www.dogsecretary.com/ using wordpress - its easy to me, but then again I speak 'the language'.
    It is definitely much easier to power your site using something like wordpress. If I can help you get beyond your stuck point, shoot me a message!

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  2. Elf6:38 PM

    The basic, no-frills wordpress isn't quite that hard. Still took me more time to figure out what to do and where than it did on blogger. I didn't try messing with plug-ins or downloads or nuthin'. Good luck with all that. This is for your professional web site?

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  3. Elayne10:20 AM

    O.k. kids, stop saying it's easy!!! It just makes me want to cry. Seriously though, thanks for your offer of help Greg. I think I'm nearly there with understanding most of what I need to understand but if I get too frustrated or pressed for time I may just hire you to finish it for me depending on your schedule of course. But for now I'm a bit obsessed with trying to figure it out for myself since I've come this far. But if I had it to do over again I wouldn't have listened to my friend and would have paid to have it done. At some point I'll probably pay to have someone fix it to look fancier but I think I can do o.k. for now. We'll see how I feel at the end of the day.

    And yes it is a professional site for my new business.

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  4. Elf10:58 AM

    What I was saying is that you're obviously not using the easier version of wordpress, and that the easier version was still harder than blogger, and I sympathize about the documentation!

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  5. Elayne11:05 AM

    There is an easier version??!! Maybe that's my problem. I should have signed up for the non-computer geek idiot proof version but I couldn't even figure out how to do that.

    And I know, I'm never ever going to complain about Blogger again.

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