The Australian on the iPhone

If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, try this — a news app for The Australian designed for your device. Go to: http://www.apple.com/webapps/news/theaustralianlatestnews.html

Save it to your springboard too!

WordPress - Static text and posts on one page

OK you WordPress gurus out there — I’ve enjoyed so much using WordPress and benefiting from the work of others, that I thought I would contribute a template of my own.

One of the great needs, it seems, is a template in WordPress that lets you mix static text with posts.

For example, on this test site, the front page consists of fixed text (the welcome message) at the top followed by a list of the most recent blogs tagged news. This is done with my special template called Mixed Static.

The menu items People and Notices similarly use this Mixed Static template to display news items slugged with the categories People and Notices respectively.

The Mixed Static template can be configured on the static page inside the WordPress administration panel with fixed text at the top followed by blogs of a selected category and/or a specific number of blogs using the custom fields.

TO INSTALL

1. Download the file mixed.zip, unzip, and upload it into the directory containing the files for your active theme.

2. Create or select your chosen page in the WordPress admin.

3. Write any static text you want into the page.

4. I have deleted the automatic page heading (as sometimes you may want it, and sometimes not), so if you need a heading, I recommend you add it into the page.

5. Select Mixed Static as the page template;

6. Add either or both of these keys in the Custom Fields:

key: page_category, value=the category of the blog you want to display (no quotes)

key: page_posts, value = the number of posts you want to display (leave this out if you don’t want a limit).

7. For formatting reasons, you’ll need to switch off comments on this page. This will not switch off comments for individual posts.

8. You’ll also need to adjust the fonts and maybe some design features in the template to match those of your current theme’s style sheet. Call up one of the theme’s other templates and note the class ID’s etc. used and modify my template so they match.

That’s it.

I have used a template configured this way for the home page of the test site — with the page set to private. This prevents it from appearing twice in the main menu. (This may work only for some templates).

Please let me know if you find this useful — unfortunately I have a full-time job and little time to spend on this, so if it doesn’t work for you, feel free to hack it.