True, and here’s a related post I wrote earlier about Plugins vs. Without a Plugin. Still, we keep seeing such tutorials piling up everyday, even obvious ones like Google Analytics. Why would one want to go through the trouble of copying and pasting code into their theme’s header.php file, and then breaking everything when they change their theme or when the theme gets an update? Why...
P2 for WordPress Gets an Update!
Not much has changed from the previous version. Perhaps the most exciting change is that you can now create todo lists, by adding an “o” or an “x” at the beginning of a new line. Cool huh? If you’re new to P2, don’t forget to read this article by Matt on why we use P2 at Automattic.
San Kloud Theme by Theme.fm, now on WordPress.com
Today WordPress.com has launched a couple of new themes, and one of them is San Kloud. I remember introducing the San Kloud theme for WordPress on Theme.fm, back in August last year, and it’s made almost nine thousand downloads since then. Designed by Umit Kayabas and developed by Alexander Permyakov, San Kloud is a great theme for blogging. Congratulations to the Theme.fm team for making...
Dear WordPress Theme Developers, Stop Using TimThumb
Just a reminder, since this weekend I had to help out with yet another TimThumb-powered WordPress theme, broken by a “security patch” at the web hosting provider. This time it was Acquisto by Press75. The problems of Acquisto are not limited to thumbnails.
John Hawkins: Intro to Child Theming
It’s never too late to learn about child themes in WordPress, and in this video from WordCamp San Diego, John walks us through the very basics of child theming, overriding templates, overriding vs. pluggable functions and of course theme frameworks.
A Note About get_template_part and Child Themes
Tip: if you’re wondering why your WordPress template file (for example index.php) is not being executed, perhaps a different file (archive.php) is overriding it. Now this may sound obvious, but not when you start using get_template_part to organize your theme files, and not when you’re making a child theme. Let’s take a quick look at the following snippet: get_template_part(...
Diet Pills, SEO, and Theme Frameworks by Andy Stratton
Andy Stratton gave a presentation called “Diet Pills, SEO, and Theme Frameworks” at WordCamp Chicago 2011. He talked about WordPress themes, frameworks, marketplaces and a lot of related misconceptions, and some of the many problems with commercial themes including SEO, customization, child themes. Here’s a quote if you haven’t got time to watch the whole video. There are...
About the "Lock in Effect" in WordPress Themes and Plugins
The WordPress themes and plugins market is huge these days. With all that wide range of products available, we sometimes stumble into situations where we’d like to change our mind, i.e. use a different plugin or theme instead of the one we’re currently using. Eventually we figure out that it’s incredibly tough to replace some of the themes and plugins, because as soon as...
Git Archive for WordPress Themes
Quick tip! If you’re using Git when developing WordPress themes and would like to create a clean “export” of the theme that would be installable from the WordPress admin interface and accepted to the WordPress.org themes directory, you can use the git archive command for that with some special arguments: git archive --format zip --output /path/to/themename-1.1.zip ...
Artiste by Orman Clark
Artiste by Orman Clark is a very nice looking portfolio theme for WordPress released today. Just like the rest of Orman’s themes, this one’s got a bunch of options, widgets, shortcodes and templates as well as a layered PSD for heavy customization. Doesn’t seem like it responds to media queries but the layout is flexible enough to fit an portrait iPad.