Plugin / Article Forge

Installation

Article Forge is simple to install and use with WordPress. The only requirement is a shift in perspective in how WordPress organizes and generates pages. The underlying engine for the Article Forge plugin makes a clear distinction between the concept of WordPress templates and that of generated content inside the theme’s displayable content area. Generally speaking, WordPress requires the site maintainer to create separate template pages for each custom post type under the theme’s template directory; not the plugin directory. These templates almost always leave the template’s layout intact with changes made only in the content area. Seeking to provide a more practical and persistant approach, the Article Forge plugin provides a shared hook that generates the content for the template. In this way the user is not required to copy source html from the plugin directory and edit it.

There are various ways to utilize this feature with the simplest approach for those who wish to use Article Forge with other content types (this includes post and custom) is to do it the ‘WordPress’ way.
* Copy ‘single.php’ and ‘archive.php’ located under your Themes working directory to ‘single-articleforge_summary.php’ and ‘archive-articleforge_summary.php’ respectively.
* Edit these files using the WP built-in editor under the Admin Appearance menu. Remove the existing post content generation area (usually denoted by <div id="content>) and replace it with

     <?php regwptk_generate_content(); ?>

The other approach for users who only wish to use Article Forge for site content can modify ‘single.php’ and ‘archive.php’ directly while those wishing to use Article Forge with WordPress Posts can copy those files to ‘single-post.php’ and ‘archive-post.php’ before editing. (For those brave souls who are interested in testing a new approach to content generation via plugins with custom post types in WordPress should contact me via <>.)

Article Forge will generate the content based on the post type of the post(s) being displayed and the context of the request (ie. archive, single, search). If it detects that the post type is not one of its own registered types, it will defer back to the WordPress template engine to generate the page.

Basic CSS is provided for the generated HTML with ample class tags provided for your customization needs. It is suggested that users copy the contents of the ‘default’ directory under the Article Forge plugin ‘content’ directory to a parallel directory under ‘content’. (You can specify that content be served from this directory by editing the appropriate option under the Article Forge settings page.) Note that any CSS or JS files that you place under the css and js directories are automatically included in Article Forge content pages.

Slugs designating the articles and article areas in the URL are defined in the Article Forge Settings page under the admin area. They are respectively ‘articles’ and ‘article’ by default. There are many other options avaible that control how the plugin behaves. You are encouraged to become familiar with these options.