Daring Fireballesq.

March 30, 2010 2:09 PM

Is the Daring Fireball style of linking possible on a self hosted WordPress blog and if so how easy is it to accomplish?

The title of Daring Fireball's blog articles do not point to the permalink of that post but instead they link to the main story that John (Gruber) is commenting upon. A permalink is created in the form of a star icon. Click here for an example.

posted by nam3d to computers & internet (5 answers total)

This post has one solution, but requires manual tweaking of your template.
posted by null terminated at 2:18 PM on March 30, 2010

Should be easy to do if you're comfortable editing HTML at all.

It's just a matter of taking the {*permalink*} variable out of one place & putting it somewhere else, and taking the other link & putting it there.*

* I don't work with wordpress blogs, so I don't have the exact code for you.
posted by MesoFilter at 2:44 PM on March 30, 2010

You'll have to create a custom field in wordpress called "external-link" (or whatever you want)... Put the URL in that field.

Now look for something like this in the loop in your theme:

<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>

Change it to something like this:

<h2><a href="<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'external-link', true); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a> <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><img src="starimage.gif" /></a></h2>
posted by brundlefly at 5:05 PM on March 30, 2010 [3 favorites]

Definitely possible, and not very hard to do if you are comfortable editing Wordpress themes. Basically, you will need to create a custom field which you can use to store the URL you want to link to, and then rewrite the PHP code that generates your blog title, in index.php and elsewhere in your theme. The link null terminated posted will point you in the right direction.
posted by oulipian at 5:09 PM on March 30, 2010

Oops, outposted by brundlefly!
posted by oulipian at 5:11 PM on March 30, 2010