Author Archives: Ian Stewart

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 […]

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? Within the loop? That’s fairly easy too. Here’s the code:
<?php echo get_avatar( get_the_author_email(), ‘80’ ); ?>
Pretty simple, huh? […]

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 for release? How do you style it when the instructions tell you to modify […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]