Web design and development musings from a mad man.
For WordPress Day I decided to pull out an old trick of mine. When I first saw the MSNBC redesign I immediately wanted to recreate the sections in a theme. It proved to be a bit more involved than I had first imagined. Look out ahead, heavy php content coming!
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Today I have a quick tip for all the WordPress theme developers. I’m actually working on a theme right now and thought I would share a tip that will make your themes much more user friendly.
Often when developing themes for one reason or another you want the end user to give you the ID for a category. This could be so you could call certain categories, or exclude them, or create custom menus etc. In previous WordPress versions Continue Reading
When setting up themes I like to give people options, lots of options, some say too many options. Those options usually come in the form of widget ready areas for WordPress themes. There are widgets for just about everything now, and more being developed everyday. You could even make your own widget. With so many types of widgets an easy way to make your theme customizable is to “widgetize” areas.
My Checkmate theme has 10 widget areas! With that many places to stuff widgets things can start to get confusing. I’ve adopted an easy way of not only clueing in end users of where the widget area is but also keeping the code easy to read.
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I told you earlier I was going to release it, and here it is! The Checkmate WordPress theme. It is a classic blog style template with a minimalist design packed with features and customizing options. This is one to definitely download and try out and includes a quick start guide to show you how to use some of the features.
Checkmate Demo - The demo is a bit messy looking because I tried to show off as much of the theme as I could.
My previous post on writing a simple related posts plugin was a popular one, and one reader wanted to take it further for a website he was working on. Well it was painfully obvious that my example was inadequate for doing any sort of fun stuff so I started adding bits and pieces to create a more robust widget. If you haven’t already, you might want to read the first post to get caught up.
This isn’t a true “plugin” in the sense you can activate it in Wordpress, but more of a widget you can plug into your theme. This widget is going to grab posts based on tags and return specific info from the matching posts. This will be a good chance to see some of the guts of Wordpress being used and how you might use them for your own projects.
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Last week I wrote a post about what I was doing to speed up my website. While that post is an informative, well-written piece of literary genius, it didn’t go into a whole lot of detail. That detail is in this post, because two posts are better than one. I’ve tweaked, found problems, fixed a few problems, and learned a thing or two. I also learned there is a lot to learn.
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I told you a surprise was coming, and this is it. A free theme! I’ve named it Solid, why? Because it was the first word that came to mind when making the theme AND I believe its a pretty solid theme. While looking around at some blogs I started noticing some really nice simple blogs (design wise). These were the blogs I was stopping at and actually looking at the content. I decided to design my own theme in this fashion and this is the result.
While re-aligning my website I realized I was writing a lot of redundant code. Some page templates were nearly exactly the same like the category and tags pages, the only difference was one word! Copying and pasting that one template seemed like a big waste of time, and it was.
I read somewhere that good programmers are lazy programmers. Not in the sense that they don’t fix their own code when they find a better way to do it…but that they don’t repeat code, over and over and over again. Not only does it take longer to repeat code, but it is a royal pain when you need to update(like when a CSS framework gets updated and drops a class name…).
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Looking around the site you may notice graphics that look like stickers or old worn paper and cloth. These are getting more and more popular as grunge starts taking over the shiny web2.0 look, and they are really easy to make. Now turn on some good music and lets get started. Continue Reading
It was a long weekend for me, to make a long story short I’ve got a fresh new install of OS X and a lot more cars in Forza 2. Not that anything went wrong, just needed to update my desktop machine to the 21rst century and relax a bit from all my coding and designing. About the time I was installing MySQL I thought I should share my development environment. While it isn’t perfect for everyone, it is a solid environment that will work for most people. Continue Reading
