It’s a Sunday, so that means “Let’s mess around with WordPress!”
Today was no exception. Changes were made, but they’re nothing that you, readers, would see. Rather, I installed two new plug-ins that make changes on the backend that I see when I write posts, approve comments, and the like. The one front-end change I made recently was yesterday–I added a sidebar feature that shows the Astronomy Picture of the Day. Because I’m a space nerd like that.
What were today’s changes?
The first change is something useful and helpful. It’s the Automattic Stats Plugin. It’s a stat-tracker, basically. I can find out search phrases, popular posts, incoming links, and the like, even links people click to leave. Thus far I’ve not messed around with it much. What I’ve seen is interesting. More importantly, I know it will be useful. I’ll get stats without the tedious mess of pulling server logs. 🙂
The second change? I installed WP Tiger Administration. It’s a complete remodel of the WordPress backend. And it looks fabulous. I’m an Opera user–because, yes, Opera rocks socks–and the WordPress backend was okay in Opera, but not great. Little layout quirks here and there. Also, it was blue. WP Tiger gives the WordPress backend a completely different look. Everything’s the same–because the content’s the same–but at the same time everything’s got a different gloss, there are icons for various functions, and it looks more like an application than a portal. I like this. 🙂
Installing WP Tiger meant I needed to make a change to the “Hello Dolly” plug-in. Hello Dolly is a plug-in that put a random line from the song “Hello Dolly” in the upper corner of the WordPress administration backend. Having no interest in “Hello Dolly” I changed the possible lyrics to those from the Beatles’ “Revolution.” Because of the way WP Tiger changed the layout of the backend, the “Revolution” lyric went in the wrong place. Five minutes worth of experimentation with CSS, and now I’ve got lyrics from Revolution in the bottom left hand corner.
My current line from “Revolution”? “Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright?”
I think whipped up a quick piece of code–basically a cut-and-paste of code from “Hello Dolly”–to put the current shire date on my admin screens. That’s neat–I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before.
My Sunday tinkering, then. I don’t know that I can mess with WordPress any more. There’s nothing left for me to change. 😉