A shout-out goes to Rage for his contribution. He scored a rewards pack. Even though it was a small contribution. Every little bit helps and I am grateful for him taking the time out of his life to positively effect another.
So in today’s post I am posting a bounty. If you read my post yesterday I’ve become infatuated with these sunglasses on Amazon. Yankidank thinks they look ugly. I don’t care. They would be perfect for me while riding the bus to different doctors appointments. I won’t have to hear the others on the bus, and best of all I won’t have to make eye contact.
So the bounty is that if you get me these sunglasses from my wishlist today, I will design, compile, and submit a custom Chrome App for your Pligg site free of charge. Make sure you check the wishlist first to see if they are still listed. If they are not listed it means someone beat you to it.
Ok on to the Template Tuesday Post
It had been brought up before and even criticized by a couple people that Pligg uses too many files for it’s templates. In fact the reason why there are so many files is so you can break down the different areas and customize them more easily. You could in theory make a Pligg template with 1 file. But it would be a big file and contain a lot of {if} statements in it. But in theory it is possible.
Most people are intimidated by the pligg template when they go into customizing it. So I’ll break down the main files you will want to customize and show you that it’s not really all that hard.
There are 5 main files were you can change that will make your entire site look different. These are the header.tpl, footer.tpl. link_summary.tpl, and the style.css. Just by editing those files you could make a template look almost like anything you want.
Now if you want to get extra fancy you can change the comment_show.tpl and the user_center.tpl. You’ll notice that most of your changes unless they are structure related will take place in the style.css file. If you want to edit the category menu you will want to edit the dropdown-default.css.
Also take note that when making template edits it’s best to use an offline editor such as ConTEXT or Notepad++. I don’t recommend using the included template editor within Pligg because it doesn’t work for all hosts.
Another note is that when making template edits you’ll want to clear your template cache quite regularly from the admin panel. Always keep a fresh copy of the file you are editing close by, just in case you make a mistake you can quickly re-upload a fresh copy of the file and start over again. One thing I have noticed is that deleting the template cache from the Pligg admin panel doesn’t seem to take care of the cached category menu. You may have to manually delete those files with your FTP. They are the 3 ling string files located in the root /cache/ folder.
As always, I hope that you will take a moment to make a contribution. You can see why it’s so important to me, and you can get yourself some free stuff and it also feels really good to give. Try it! If you wish to give a tangible item, you can always check out the wishlist.
Tune in tomorrow
~ ChuckRoast