DLUXstudios.com is the creative practice of Art Director, Designer & Illustrator Sean Gallagher. Sean lives & works in New York. He likes skateboarding & Robochan.
Convert Wordpress pages to posts & un-break things.
September 4th, 2009
For the last oh, I don’t know few years I have been building sites here and there with Wordpress. Now that Wordpress is essentially a full blown amazing CMS (say it isn’t, I dare you.) you can do some really slick stuff. My site runs on it, and I haven’t spent any time on it. And I still got some jQuery fun time in with no probs.
Anyway, The last month or so, I have spent my time being overworked and underpaid on a few massive projects. One of which was LTDmag.com and it’s full massive redesign. And by redesign I don’t mean “Let’s make the links and background a different color.” or “skinning” it. God I hate it when people say “skin” in reference to what would otherwise be IA/UI/UX. As if… But I digress… Part of the big task was moving LTD off of wordpress 2.5. and onto the future…
Now we all know Wordpress is fully updatable and it’s backend is completely separate from it’s presentation layer, so why all the fuss? Well some “agency” decided that they know all about information architecture and admin UI in addition to apprently being “experts” on Wordpress, and built some kind of un-upgradeable hacked version of Wordpress. It was a impressive backend, but it was amazing how they were ignoring what WP has built in that already does EVERYthing they needed it to do. They are called custom fields YO!
But far be it from me to claim expertise and perfection, for lo and behold I thought it’d be awesome to convert a directory of stores that was trapped in FLASH, and spit them out in clean XHTML and CSS. Yay! I love Flash, but seriously… this is a database of businesses with google maps yo. Shit needs to work on muh phone… nah’mean?
Long story, longer… I made a parent PAGE that listed all the CHILD PAGES. Boom. Done. Only problem is… paginating static pages and matching my query… not so easy.
Obvious fix, make Spots a Category under the POSTS timeline. Pagination done! New Problem: converting like, 100 PAGES into POSTS 
Nevermind LTD’s sweet hardworking intern already entered all the busted data from v1’s flash hackjob into HTML; PAGE by PAGE, but now we gotta go back and re-make them POST by POST.
I SAY BULLSHIT!
Check this out : P2P converter! Saves ASSES!
This guy makes a plugin that amazingly converts ANY PAGE into a POST AND ( no way right?) ANY POST into a PAGE. AMAZING. Donate some Cheddah to homie! I am!
Now, I know there are ways to make mySQL databases just change tables, and table names and shit. But I don’t speak nerd-command-line. If you do, holla at me, I wanna hang.
Anyway, if you have found yourself making IA blunders like me, this amazing plugin freaking rules. Holla.