A change to the Gulf Coast Texas site infrastructure

I bit the bullet today and made one of the final big changes to the Gulf Coast Texas publishing conglomeration and imported the Gulf Coast Texas Outdoor Magazine database into the Wordpress Mu environment. This may not seem like a big deal but it is. From the outside nothing has changed but on the back-end the change will greatly simplify management of the GCT properties no matter how many are eventually added.

Originally I created the Mu environment strictly for the blogs but the more I tinkered with Wordpress Mu it became clear everything should be in the same database. All GCT content with the exception of the Photo Gallery is now managed in one application, Wordpress Mu.  The Gallery will have to be moved eventually but that task is not currently very high on the to-do list. In hindsight, using PixelPost for the Gallery was a mistake.

During the move today there was some downtime while I figured out how to show a specific home page template  for the magazine and another template for the blogs. Got that all sorted out by renaming the home.php page for the magazine to home-mag.php and renaming the page-blog.php template to home-blog.php. Then I created a new home.php whose only job is to execute the following php statement:

<

?php
if (1 == $blog_id) {
    include(TEMPLATEPATH."/home-mag.php");
}else{
    include(TEMPLATEPATH."/home-blog.php");
};
?>

Works like a charm. The only problem now is the Featured Gallery Content plugin does not work in Wordpress Mu. Not that big a deal (especially since I haven’t added a new feature since Christmas!) but it creates more work as I need to plug some cool looking content in the now blank feature spot. There is another plugin I’m looking at called Dynamic Gallery Content that does basically the same thing.

Really the only reason I bring this up is that I haven’t posted anything in a while and also to say that if you tried to view your blog today and it was looking funny, my apologies. These things happen sometimes.