One of Checkmate’s features is the ability to select multiple categories as feature categories. It wasn’t until far after the release a user brought up the fact it didn’t work…at all. So I set off to fix it thinking it was a trivial task using query_posts or get_posts. I was wrong. To keep everything as compatible as could be and offer the ease of use I intended took some digging. I ended up skipping all of WordPress’s functions and going strait to the database by writing a custom function.
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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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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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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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