The general layout of the new thelantern.com is done! I finished adding the required pages and creating the menus on Monday, and on Tuesday added the coloration CSS rules for the top navigation.

There was an interesting bug where individual story contents would not show in the individual-post pages. It turned out that the function do_sociable() wasn’t defined, and so the page was failing and aborting at that point. Because of this, sidebar and footer weren’t being sent to the browser. I fixed this by removing references to that plugin in the template.

Instead of Sociable, I’ve installed 2-Click Social Media Buttons, which protect reder privacy while still allowing sharing. I may change the plugin, though, because that plugin does not perform well when called twice on the same page. Chris Schwartz, who developed the WordPress theme for The Lantern, said that research shows that many people share the story before even finishing reading it, meaning that it’s good to have sharing buttons near the top.

I don’t like how the theme has a grey background and small text for the story, so next week, once I get the widget situation figured out, I’ll ask Dan and the design editor about making the story background white and the font bigger.

Still no server access, but the email blast and its authoring tool are coming along well. I’ve spent less time on Codecademy this week than I’d've liked, but that’s because the authoring tool was completed this week. I haven’t put it online yet, but it allows the Lantern’s editors to choose between a few different formats for the top story of the page.

The worst bug I encountered this week was a lone, unclosed [

The authoring tool is set up to take the email blast template, but I'm waiting for final approval from the Lantern's editors, my supervisors, and myself before I throw the email template's HTML into the variables of the JavaScript powering the authoring tool. Right now, all it does is generate test code:

From: "The Lantern" 
To: <%to%>
Subject: 
X-BulkMail-Envelope-From:  
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: multipart/alternative; boundary="Boundary_foo"

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.


--Boundary_foo
Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT





open table for ad
	Image = http://f.benlk.com/edu/Lantern/email-files/ad-728.jpg
	Link = http://www.thelantern.com/advertise-with-the-lantern
close table for ad

email table top
	button bar tr
	lantern header tr
	topstory tr opening HTML
	Text-only top story:
		Headline: 
		Link: 
		Blurb: undefined

	topstory tr closing HTML
	Middle ad
		Image = http://f.benlk.com/edu/Lantern/email-files/ad-468.jpg
		Link = http://www.thelantern.com/advertise-with-the-lantern
	Bottom table top
		Bottom table left column top
		#2-title,#2-url,#2-blurb
			Story 2 title: “”
			Story 2 url: 
			Story 2 blurb: 
		Bottom table left column bottom
		Bottom table right column top
			Bottom table right sidebar ad
				Image = undefined
				Link = undefined
		Bottom table right column bottom
	Bottom table bottom
Footer, including links to Lantern contacts and advertising



–Boundary_foo–