ReDev…again

I’m trying desperately to do some hardcore WordPress theme development and i fear i am a wee bit over my head. However, usually when i do something stupid and try and make the site do something it doesn’t normally, well, i’m always in way over my head but there you go. I am posting this here and on wordpress.org to see if anyone can help me with it.

Old Current Version

The first image here is how the site currently works/looks. First it takes the most recent post and features it at the top of the page. Then it goes on to display the next ten or so posts with thumbnails albeit limited to 220 characters or so. It is checking the category then assigning the appropriate image. It does that using the following code:

<?php if (is_category(‘7’) ):
<img src='<?php bloginfo(‘template_url’);?>/images/cat7.jpg’ alt=” />
<?php } elseif (is_category(‘8’) ):
<img src='<?php bloginfo(‘template_url’);?>/images/cat8.jpg’ alt=” />
<?php endif; ?>

This is an abbreviation of the full code used as i’m using about 10 diff categories and thumbnails.

This is all a bit messy to be honest. And now i am using twitter it is becoming crowded with that little bird bless him. I want to restyle the layout of the posts. That can be done simply with some good CSS. What I really want to do though is to change the layout of the tweet posts completely.

New Layout

This is where the second image comes into play. This image shows roughly how i’d like to display the Tweet posts and the standard posts. I’m gonna do away with featuring the first post as its not really for me on this site – i hate it actually. You will see though that the layout of the tweetpost is very different from the standard one.

I’m using twitter tools to sort the tweets and part of what it does is post my tweets as posts but in doing so it creates a title as well as the content. Fair enough

– it has to for wordpress. I don’t want it to display the Title ad the content. I want to get rid of the titles for these tweetpots.

The way i have been thinking of doing it:

I want to create different templates for each category then create a query in the loop to see which template to use to display the post. The lovely people at wpcandy.com have created a great cheat sheet on a PDF (found this via webdesignledger.com), on the 3rd page is the following code:

<?php
$post = $wp_query- >post;
if ( in_category(‘3’) ) {
include(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/cat3.php’);
} elseif ( in_category(‘4’) ) {
include(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/cat4.php’);
} else {
include(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/cat.php’);
} ? >

I want to put this code in to my pages so that whenever a tweet or standard post appears that it will display in a nice and pretty fashion. I just don’t have the PHP/WordPress skills to know which bits of code to change. I have been trying but i keep getting errors.

SOOOOOOOOOO…..

any ideas?

If anyone out thewre with a super-brain cares to crack this one i’d be a very happy boy.

Questions welcome.

You can find this as a forum post on the wordpress forums too here.