Tag: Themes

Liked Building a WordPress Theme From Scratch (joseph-dickson.com)

I’m a fan of using WordPress to build custom websites. So I’ve decided to start a tutorial series and share how I go about building a theme from scratch. No frameworks or starter themes. The Sketch Sketch of the theme’s design The layout sketch
Before even setting up my development environment I…

Replied to Considering Our WordPress Development Patterns by Tom Woodward (bionicteaching.com)

I believe we’ve developed a pretty solid pattern for making WordPress do what faculty want and making that happen pretty quickly. We have high goals in terms of taking on additional challenging work while also supporting a lot of things and a lot of people so we’ve had to be fairly pragmatic in terms of workflow.

There are three types of development we tend to do. I’ll list them below in terms of escalating complexity/time. I’ll explain what plugins and patterns we use to make this work. I know I’ve hashed through this plenty of times before in individual explanations but felt that putting in together in one place might help people, myself included, see the big picture.

Thank you Tom for sharing your various strategies and workflows. I like the look of the Display Posts and Page List plugins. I am also rethinking my CCS changes. I have always put them in a child theme, however I am thinking that placing them in the customiser or even a seperate plugin would provide more portability if I were to change themes.
Replied to Super Secret Journal Posts by Tom Woodward (bionicteaching.com)

Let’s say someone wanted people to write down very personal, very sensitive thoughts about privilege, bias etc. They’ve turned down Google Docs as an option because they heard that people can see that. They want this even if you’ve said that writing down secrets at all is not a good idea and that writing them anywhere digital, let alone the Internet, is a very bad idea.

Tom, what is the difference between using your super secret journal posts and the usual private posts?
Liked Duplicate Featured Image Remover by Tom Woodward (bionicteaching.com)

Origin Story
In a number of scenarios we’ve used plugins to use the first image in the post as the featured image. That’s nice in that if people forget or are unaware of the featured image it’ll happen automatically and that fits in nicely with how various themes use featured images in various…

Liked The Beginner’s Guide to WordPress Actions and Filters (Code Envato Tuts+)

In this post, we’re going to take a look at the WordPress page life cycle, understand how hooks work, and review the differences in actions and filters so that we may not only become better theme and/or plugin developers, but also have a deeper understanding of how WordPress works.

via Chris Aldrich
Replied to Kidding Around With the WordPress Customizer (CogDogBlog)

In my last post I mentioned making a child WordPress theme mainly to offer customization to parts of theme footer that is usually hard coded. Maybe it’s too much detail, but I thought it a small example of how this is done.

Another reminder why I really need to play around with my child theme a bit more.
Bookmarked Avoiding the Lock-in Effect in WordPress – Nelio Software by https://www.facebook.com/avillegas (Nelio Software)

If you change your theme or disable any of your WordPress plugins and your website breaks down, you are suffering from the lock-in effect. Learn about it.

I sometimes worry about this in regards to the IndieWeb, especially the Post Kinds plugin. Although David Shanske stores it for future use, I feel it would require a significant technical knowledge, which I don’t have.
Replied to Announcing WP-Lens a new, simple WordPress Theme for Photographers (CogDogBlog)

Here is another new experimenting in porting a Creative Commons licensed HTML5 Up template into a WordPress theme, say hello to WP-Lens. This joins my three previous HTML5 Up to WordPress themes.

This looks like a really slick theme Alan. It has me thinking that it would be cool as a repository. Really want to spin it up and test it out. Wondering about using it with External URL Featured Image to co-claim? Or using it with SNAP to syndicate to Flickr, Tumblr etc.

Syndicated from Read Write Collect

Liked SPLOTting a Path to Coventry (bavatuesdays)

Continued excitement around SPLOTs is timely given the day before heading to Coventry, Tim and I spoke with Alan Levine about starting to roll SPLOTs out as stand-alone application installers. Big Picture Calling Card will be the first, but hopefully more will follow given Tim is on an Installatron application installation roll. One of the big benefits of stand-alone apps is all updates Alan makes to the SPLOTs will get rolled out to users, through the current WordPress installation of SPLOTs there is no way to incorporate updates.

Liked Creating a tag cloud directory for the Post Kinds Plugin on WordPress by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (BoffoSocko)

Yesterday after discovering it on Xavier Roy’s site I was reminded that the Post Kinds Plugin is built on a custom taxonomy and, as a result, has the ability to output its taxonomy in typical WordPress Tag Cloud widget.

Bookmarked 15 Useful WordPress Configuration Tricks That You May Not Know by http://facebook.com/syedbalkhi (WPBeginner)

The ultimate collection of the most useful WordPress configuration (wp-config.php) tricks that you may need but do not know about!

This is a useful guide into the backend of WordPress. Two tricks stood out to me:

Changing Your Site or WordPress Address

Normally, you can set your WordPress and Site URLs from Settings » General page. However, you may not be able to do that if you don’t have access to your WordPress site, seeing redirect errors, or have just moved your site.

In that case, you can change your site and WordPress URLs via wp-config.php file by adding the following lines:

define('WP_HOME', 'http://www.example.com');
define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://www.example.com');

And

Moving wp-content Directory

WordPress allows you to move your wp-content directory. Some experts believe that it can help strengthen WordPress security.

You will need to add the following code to your wp-config.php file:

define( 'WP_CONTENT_DIR', $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/blog/wp-content' );
define( 'WP_CONTENT_URL', 'http://example/blog/wp-content');
define( 'WP_PLUGIN_DIR', $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/blog/wp-content/plugins' );
define( 'WP_PLUGIN_URL', 'http://example/blog/wp-content/plugins');

Don’t forget to replace example.com with your own domain name.

I wonder if this would allow me to better integrate my ‘home’ space and have a shared content / plugin library between my different sites?

Replied to Show/Fork Us The SPLOTS! (CogDogBlog)

If you are creating sites with these WordPress themes I have built (as well as the three Calling Card ones, WP-Dimension, WP-Highlights, and WP-Big Picture — I need a favor.

I want you to… SHOW US THE SPLOTS!

Went to add my use of your themes Alan and see that they are already on the list. Happy days.
Replied to Setting up WordPress for IndieWeb use by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko)

This was a really helpful walk-through Chris. I agree with your point in the IndieWeb podcast that it could be compressed into half an hour, but I always thought that was the point of adjusting the playback speeds?

I just had a few thoughts / questions while watching / listening:

    I never realised that I could add all my Rel=Me links within my profile, does that mean that I do not have to go through all the rigmarole of adding them to my ‘child theme’? That definitely makes it a lot easier to setup.
    I am really interested in modifying / developing a custom post kind, but what happens when David Shanske updates the plugin? How do I set up to allow for updates and customisation? Is this some sort of ‘child theme’?
    I wonder if it were possible (maybe in the IndieWeb multisite or something) to customise the ‘Welcome’ box when you first start WordPress? Imagine if the information that is detailed in the IndieWeb plugin area could be placed there, front and centre?
Bookmarked pfefferle/ZenPress (GitHub)

ZenPress – Pure Zen for WordPress

I recently started exploring David Shanske’s 2016 IndieWeb Theme for Read Write Collect. Before, I had been using Matthias Pfefferle’s Zen Press. I really like Zen for its looks and still may go back or use it for my main site. It has the feel of Medium without being in Medium. My concerns were:

  • There were small quirks with how Syndication Links and Search Results were presented (since changed)
  • I could not master my widgets, particularly the way it repeated some widgets at the bottom of the page, even after I had changed them in Appearance settings. (Since discovered to be unrelated to the theme)
  • I was unable to get a child theme to work, even with the help of Chris Aldrich. (Zen has five stylesheets which not being included, however this still did not solve the problem.)
  • I could not get the Notes post kind to work with Micro.Blog as I think a default heading was included within the RSS (again fixed since)