This extended category features quality articles about developing clean, smart and fast websites with WordPress. The articles are intermediate level, with an emphasis on practical, hands-on discussions related to WordPress. Curated by Jeff Starr. Subscribe to the RSS-Feed.
Popular tags in this category: Essentials, Techniques, Hacks, Templates, PHP, Themes, Plugins, Resources.
It’s interesting to look back at our previous WordPress themes round-ups. It’s almost like looking at a visual timeline not only of WordPress’ advances in theme design, but of the rapid development in functionality of the CMS itself. The themes from year to year clearly differ in style as Web design trends have evolved. As each year passes and more functionality is added to WordPress’ core, these improvements are strongly reflected in the themes developed for it.
Once upon a time, all WordPress themes looked like traditional blogs, with basic functionality and not a heck of a lot more. But as you will see from the themes below, that original “blog” design style is clearly gone, perhaps never to be seen again. It makes you feel nostalgic.
Nowadays, user requirements for WordPress themes are very high. Users expect all themes (including free ones) to have pages for admin options built in, where you can quickly set up your website and personalize it with a minimum of fuss. With the rise of these options pages, niche-specific theme designs (such as for portfolios, blogs or magazines) are no longer required and are, in fact, few and far between.
Read more...The WordPress eco-system has changed so much in the past few years that keeping up with all of it has become a challenge! It's been so encouraging not only to see WordPress themes and plug-ins increase in quality and use, but to see the overall appeal and acceptance in the worldwide marketplace grow as well.
For example, you know that an application is gaining a lot of steam when some of the largest organizations in the world (including many Fortune 50 businesses) are starting to use it for both their internal and external properties.
Read more...The default "category" and "tag" taxonomies in WordPress offer a lot of flexibility to those with imagination and in my development experience I have seen a wide range of creative implementations. With the introduction of custom taxonomies and their growing ease of use, though, we need no longer be bound to categories and tags. With the ability to create both hierarchical and non-hierarchical taxonomies and with the introduction of several new features in WordPress 3.1, now is the time, if you're not already, to begin putting custom taxonomies to use.
In part one of this two part series, we learned how to setup custom post types and custom taxonomies. We also learned how to build a template to check for and display media attached to custom posts. Now, we'll learn how to use custom taxonomy templates to organize and relate our media. Let's get started!
Read more...WordPress is amazing. With its growing popularity and continual development, it is becoming the tool of choice for many designers and developers. WordPress projects, though, are pushing well beyond the confines of mere "posts" and "pages". How do you go about adding and organizing media and all its complexities? With the introduction of WordPress 3.1, several new features were added that make using WordPress to manage media even more practical and in this tutorial, we're going to dive in and show you how.
In part one, we're going to setup custom post types and custom taxonomies, without plugins. After that, we'll build a template to check for and display media attached to custom posts. Then, in part two, we'll use custom taxonomy templates to organize and relate media (and other types of content).
Read more...With the advent of sophisticated and user-friendly content management systems like WordPress, textual content has become increasingly easier to manage. The architecture of these systems aims to deliver a well-formed code foundation; this means that if you are a good writer, then your content will be just as awesome as the structure and quality of the code that runs it.
However, media handling is, by nature, not the greatest. In many cases, images are used merely to make the website look good, not to supplement the content. Little care is usually taken to make these elements as useful as their textual counterparts. They are often tacked on as an afterthought; the owner thinks, “If all of my posts have an image, surely I should find something quickly for this next one as well.”
Read more...It has been a big year for WordPress. If there were still some lingering doubts about its potency as a full-fledged content management system, then the full support for custom taxonomies and custom post types in WordPress 3.0 core should have put them to rest. WordPress 3.1 took those leaps one step further, polishing custom taxonomies with multi-taxonomy query support, polishing custom post types with native template support for archives and feeds, and introducing features (like the “admin bar”) that make it easier to quickly edit and add content from the front end.
In the broader community, we’ve seen incredible plug-in suites such as BuddyPress mature, and even the emergence of independent WordPress-dedicated hosting services, such as page.ly. To celebrate WordPress’s progress, let’s review some new tips that can help template developers and consultants up their game even further.
Read more...WordPress professionals are faced with many options when deciding which membership-based theme providers are worth their investment. It is important to know how frequent future releases are, what your actual cost will be over time and what kind of support you can expect. It is also important to know what types of themes you will be gaining access to.
What I will provide in this article is information to help you compare the details of popular WordPress theme clubs, so that you can more easily determine which might be useful in your situation. There are dozens of companies that provide commercial WordPress themes on a membership basis. Let’s first discuss what it means to be a member of a theme club, who theme clubs are ideally suited for and what you generally get as a member of a theme club.
Read more...Plugins are a major part of why WordPress powers millions of blogs and websites around the world. The ability to extend WordPress to meet just about any need is a powerful motivator for choosing WordPress over other alternatives. Having written several plugins myself, I've come to learn many (but certainly not all) of the ins-and-outs of WordPress plugin development, and this article is a culmination of the things I think every WordPress plugin developer should know. Oh, and keep in mind everything you see here is compatible with WordPress 3.0+.
The first thing you should do when developing a WordPress plugin is to enable debugging, and I suggest leaving it on the entire time you're writing plugin code. When things go wrong, WordPress raises warnings and error messages, but if you can’t see them then they might as well have not been raised at all. Enabling debugging also turns on WordPress notices, which is important because that's how you'll know if you're using any deprecated functions.
Read more...Last year, WordPress launched arguably its biggest update ever: WordPress 3.0. Accompanying this release was the brand new default theme, TwentyTen, and the promise of a new default theme every year. Somewhat surprisingly, TwentyTen declares the HTML5 doctype but doesn’t take advantage of many of the new elements and attributes that HTML5 brings.
Now, HTML5 does many things, but you can’t just add <!doctype html> to the top of a document and get excited that you’re so 2011. Mark-up, as they say, is meaning, and HTML5 brings a whole bunch of meaning to our documents.
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