Put together a quick theme idea tonight and pushed it live to this site. Possibly a few rough areas around the edges. Overall I’m pretty happy with it, though. Really simple to put together; though I did miss my goal of keeping it under 1,000 lines of CSS. Will need to find a way to trim 50 lines. 🙂
Tag: themes
From the workshop: Don’t steal my Theme Options. Great writeup on theme options in Duet by Andy at the Theme Foundry. When you put this much thought and care into the settings of your product you are going to create a wonderful product.
Post formats in WordPress
Ian Stewart, of Thematic fame, gave a terrific presentation at WordCamp San Francisco about how to use post formats in your WordPress theme. The video is now online and posted over at ThemeShaper.
He’s also made all the slides available to download if you want to save them for later reference.
If you’re looking to make your site more flexible and better able to handle various types of content I highly recommend watching this all the way through. Great stuff.
Post formats significantly changed how I write and made a digital commonplace book possible. If you’re not using them on your site right now you’re really missing out.
WordCamp St. Louis: The Anatomy of a Premium WordPress Theme
Brian Fegter gave a talk in the afternoon discussing WordPress premium themes. Brian runs Mister Nifty where he works with churches of all sizes on their tech needs.
He got started by covering the truth about commercial themes. As he says:
There is not one single theme that does not require support. You must build a support system
Brian also believes that software development needs to be for the customer. This is why support and documentation are so important. As he pointed out, a purchased theme rarely stays in its original condition.
Having a solid template architecture is also fundamental to creating a good premium theme. Brian pointed to the WordPress Codex for information on theme development and template hierarchy.
Brian set down a credo for properly developing a theme. He believed that you should:
- follow template hierarchy patterns
- clearly name supporting files and folders
- never, never, ever, never, ever nest a plugin inside a theme
- clarity over cleverness
WordPress assets are your friend when coding a theme. There’s a lot that is built in to WordPress which will let you easily enhance a commercial theme without a large code footprint. The main things discussed were:
- clearly named sidebars
- custom post types only when necessary
- define theme locations for menus
- localize your strings
- set WP image sizes vs image resizing scripts
- leverage the power of CSS with
body_class()andpost_class()
He also showed off some cool functionality in the UpThemes framework that’s available on Github. There’s lots of sweet stuff built in there for Google fonts and more.
In some ways code is narrative. Your theme tells a story and has an intended result. The back-end code should clearly narrate the story of the front-end display. All this helps because clean code leverages the brain to quickly identify and associate words with functions.
Functions though need to use prefixes and should only try to accomplish one thing. If any function includes things that can be spun out into a separate function then they should be spun out that way. For code comments with functions Brian says that:
If it’s necessary to comment about how a function works, your code stinketh.
It’s also a good idea to use built in functionality for things like browser detection and content filtering. This keeps you from having to add lots of server overhead and user frustration. In other words, we should be creating useful code, not duplicate code.
Status
Spent the better part of a weekend starting a simple WordPress theme for photos. Boone Gorges’ post from this week make me think of attempting something similar. Put the project up on GitHub for now.
Making Custom Theme Options Easy
Toby Mckes, a WordPress developer at I Can Has Cheezburber, gave the second talk at WordCamp Developers on the theme options panels their sites use. CheezCAP is the custom theme options panel they’ve open sourced.
Cheezburger runs over 50 sites on WordPress.com VIP. CheezCAP, which stands for Cheezburger Custom Administration Panel, makes their deployment process for themes really simple.
Background
The internet is a series of tubes filled with cats. Toby started on the farm team at Cheezburber where they were putting out many sites every week. The goal was “OMG moar sites plz.”
Their initial theme deployment process was terrible. Toby had to spend half his time as a server admin. On Thanksgiving 2009 one of their sites was posted to the Guardian UK and hit 700,000 pageviews. He got to spend his Thanksgiving rebooting the server.
They also didn’t have version control. There was no way of tracking what was being changed and many sites were hacked together to the point of looking pretty bad. It was easy to make new sites but difficult to update and maintain them. They switched to a unified theme on WordPress.com.
Early on they had 10 sites running this unified theme and one file which contained all of the customization options for the sites. CheezCAP was the solution to make this easier.
CheezCAP
Licensed under the GPL v2 CheezCAP adds an options panel to make customization easy. There’s a pre-configured config file that you can customize to your liking. Its core contains a few key aspects:
- Boolean options create as basic toggle switches.
- Text options can represent alphanumeric strings to be inserted.
- Dropdown options serve as more complex options.
- User caps to limit editing ability to specific user roles.
All of this goes right into your Dashboard and lets you get new sites set up and running with custom options that require minor configuration changes. Google Analytics integration, A/B testing, custom 404 pages, and much more can all be configured with CheezCAP.
The killer feature of all this is import/export. All of these options can be exported from one site and seamlessly imported into a new site. Setting up development sites is super easy using this.
Update: Toby gave a similar talk at WordCamp Seattle and will be updating the slides from that talk.
Minimal Stream, a WordPress theme
I had extra time this weekend and decided I wanted to take a crack at making a really minimal WordPress theme. The product is now on Github and I’m calling it Minimal Stream.
It’s a one-column theme that includes support for asides, galleries, and statuses. Definitely nothing fancy but that’s just what I was going for. You can see it running now on this site so hop on over and take a look.
The first pass doesn’t include styles for tables and surely has some display bugs but I’ll be making some updates this week.
Status
Working on a WordPress theme while listening to Dan Benjamin and Merlin Mann. An awesome way to end the weekend.
Premium Themes on WP.com, the backstory. Matt talks about the backstory to bringing premium themes live on WordPress.com. Includes stats about the growth of WordPress.com compared to where it was in 2007 when the idea of premium themes was first discussed.
Responsive Twenty Ten. A Sara Cannon & Dan Gavin project that turns Twenty Ten in a slick, responsive theme. Scales to mobile, iPad, and large screen resolutions.