The second last time I’ll have to bother with these things, but for the customary university update, here we go. Swinburne has spat out a fairly reasonable timetable for me this time around, only one class I would have preferred to move.

Monday: 8:30-4:30pm (one 3hr break, one 1hr break)

Tues: 8:30-10:30am

Thurs: 8:30-3:30pm (one 1hr break)

Pretty dandy! So I would’ve shortened Thurday and dumped that class into the big break on Monday, but I guess breaks like that can be highly useful for homework purposes – especially now that I know the internet reaches my favourite cafe. I start back early March, it’s been a long, lovely holiday but I will be happy to get back in to it – just about ready I think.

Subjects will be:

  • Design & Business Strategy
  • Communication Design Strategy
  • Design for Production
  • Publication Design

Uni

There is quite a reasonable and comprehensively linked post over on Design Tech about builiding and customising WordPress Themes.

The bain of my existence at the moment is degbugging WP Themes for the various ugly versons of Internet Explorer. I have been working on a site for work as well as my own personal theme and have consquently learnt a lot in the past little while. The work related one is much more CMS (Content Management System ie. normal website) based and so it’s learning how to get plugins to work effectively for you, using php and wordpress codex to modify what the loop outputs and creating all kinds of member protected areas etc. A marvellous exercise really because all the things it has forced me to investigate. I will share the link once I get it running smoothly in IE. However,

An honorary mention must be given to:

WordPress Download Monitor Plugin – Very useful for cutting out a step and keeping things somewhat organised for those uploading pdf’s (and other) that members can access. It has some limits – in that I can’t get the formatting to work when it populates a list via category – but it’s not half bad. WordPress still lacks a really good free document management plugin.

*Wordpress Download Manager – Seems to a be a far better option than Download Monitor. Organise, upload and output categorical (or otherwise) lists of pdfs and other such uploads. Formatting works a charm. I cannot at this stage get the search to work for me, but one thing at a time.

How to use WordPress as a Member Directory – This article got me both started and then back on the right track. I tried a couple of things but this was the closest and that which worked best. Again there are a few things – that if I knew php better I would alter and it’s a bit of a pain that it leans on two plugins and there isn’t just something that will do it all for you, but hey there’s some scope for some handy programmer out there.

Blogging Design Web Design