WPD-Planet: Theme-Channel

Hide all your links

Want to concentrate solely on typography and foundational structure while you’re designing your next WordPress theme? Hide all your links. Make them black. Get rid of the underline and make them blend in. Destroy all visual evidence of hypertextuality. Show no mercy as you attack the lists and paragraphs and headings that shore up your content and don’t let anything distract you from your end goal: typographic excellence. Assuming you’re starting with a white background ...

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Thematic Version 0.3

Thematic version 0.3 is ready. If you’re upgrading, stuff moved. That’s beta for you—but don’t worry, I’ve made things better. Here’s what I’ve gone and done. Added a 3 column stylesheet Cleaned up the post meta and separated it from the comments section following popular convention (and probably breaking stylesheets) Prettified the sliding meta panel with a photoshop-y G.I. Joe handle (it’s like Snake Eyes designed it!) Added an ...

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How To Add Gravatars For The Post Author in WordPress

Now that Gravatar support is part of the WordPress core adding them into your WordPress theme is easy. Adding them to your comments has been documented. How about adding them to your post titles to highlight the comment author? That’s fairly easy too. Here’s the code: <?php echo get_avatar( get_the_author_email(), '80' ); ?> Pretty simple, huh? get_the_author_email outputs the post author’s email and the “80” is the size of the avatar image in pixels ...

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WordPress 2.5.1 Released

Another version of WordPress (2.5.1) is now available for download and it includes a very important security fix. In addition to the security fix, version 2.5.1 focuses on fixing the most annoying bugs and improving performance. Here are some highlights: Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages. Better performance for those who have many categories Media Uploader fixes An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7 Widget Administration fixes Various usability ...

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How To Build WP-PageNavi Into Your WordPress Theme

WP-PageNavi, from Lester “GaMerZ” Chan, gives you an awesome upgrade to your WordPress post-page navigation. Instead of the typical “Older Post/Newer Post” links, you get “Digg-like” pagination. Like so: Very cool. But what if you want to incorporate it into a WordPress theme? How do you style it when the instructions tell you to modify the plugin files? Good questions. I’ll tell you how. First of all you want to tell WordPress to use the ...

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Changes At ThemeShaper

There have been some changes at ThemeShaper in the past week. I have a new host for all my blogs and projects, I started an Amazon Bookstore, and the next version of my development theme, Thematic, has been released. Hosting with Fused Network I’ve changed hosts and I couldn’t be happier. Fused Network now supports ThemeShaper by hosting it for free. Free. I could cry. On top of that all my projects, domains, subdomains, databases, settings and assorted whatnots were ...

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Live Wire Series by Mark Forrester and Adii

The Live Wire Series was released last month by Premium News and it consists of three different themes: Live Wire 2.0, Live Wire Edition, and Live Wire Style. Adii worked with Mark Forrester on these themes and according to Adii, Mark was the lead creative “director” for this project. Adii and Mark packed these themes with a lot of features and they also spent a considerable time testing and troubleshooting it prior to release. The features included are: Automatic Image Resizer (requires ...

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We Need To Kill The Sidebar

It’s time for the WordPress sidebar to go, and all mention of it to be wiped out from existence. I’m not talking about the visual idea of a sidebar on your blog. No. I’m talking about the WordPress function get_sidebar() and the use of the term, Sidebar in the WordPress admin. This way of thinking is obscuring the vision of WordPress designers and limiting the potential of your blog theme. Here’s why: A sidebar doesn’t have to be a sidebar. That’s it ...

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A WordPress Theme Structure with Meaning and Possibility

Continuing work on my next theme, Thematic, one thing I want to get out of the way immediately is the structure, or skeleton, of the thing. The outer structure of any HTML+CSS document is where things usually go bonkers and the last thing I want is for my markup to make things worse when I update versions. So, that said, here’s the basic divisions of markup, which I’ll follow with some of my thinking. I’m hoping we can start a conversation over this—and I’m totally up ...

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Coming Soon: My Personal WordPress Theme Starting Point

I will soon be releasing the hacked-up version of The Sandbox that I’ve been using as a starting point to develop free and custom themes. For free. On Google Code. As an open source project. Since I have different goals than the Sandbox creators (and not as much skill!) I won’t call my changes improvements but they are changes you may appreciate: Search Engine Optimization A grid-based starting point CSS Reset and Typography based on Blueprint Markup allowing ...

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