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!
Continue Reading
As I write this, my Checkmate Theme has 800 downloads and so far the feedback I’ve gotten on it has been great. The theme is and has been used on large sites and been successful and for the most part error free.
I think Checkmate is a great theme and I want to build on its frame and use what I’ve learned to improve it. I want to update the look of Checkmate and add some more functionality to the theme. This is where all you users come in.
I want to know what the people that are interested in Checkmate want out of the theme’s next version. What do you want to be able to customize? More custom widgets? More theme options? Let me know what features you would like to see Checkmate have!
It’s alive! And almost error free. I was never happy with the previous designs of this site, they seemed pasted together like a bad 80’s collage. So I set on the adventure to re-design my own site, something I hate doing because I always want to go in a thousand different directions.
Continue Reading
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.
Continue Reading
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.
Continue Reading
Wow I got all sorts of goodies in my RSS reader today!
First up is the release of TimThumb by Tim McDaniels. This was a script created for use in the Mimbo Pro Premium Wordpress and Darren Hoyt and company have released it as open source. I can’t wait to try this out and start incorporating it into my themes. What it does is resize images so the user doesn’t have to anymore, and I think no matter what your level of skill this is much appreciated. Grab the files at Google Code.
The bbPress team has released a new version, which is primarily to update it to work with Wordpress 2.5. There have been a few improvements though.
Check out the release notes for a full list of the changes. I’ve been meaning to get my hands dirty with bbPress and I think now will be the time. Look for some themes and tutorials in the future for bbPress.
My premium Wordpress theme Checkmate is coming along nicely and will be released “soon”. The first release will be the blog only portion. There will be an advanced business version that will function more as a CMS coming out soon after the blog version. I’ll write a more detailed post in the coming days about the features, design, and all the rest of the details.
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.
Continue Reading
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.
