ThemeShaper

  • A Revolution in Theming: WordPress Theme Frameworks

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    Ian Stewart
    in

    WordPress is exceptionally easy to Theme—but it can be better. WordPress can be a smart little CMS for most websites—but it can be better. How? WordPress Theme Frameworks. A while ago I asked a whole bunch of smart people what they thought the future of WordPress themes would look like. I also asked the whole…

  • How To Protect Your WordPress Theme Against Upgrades

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    Ian Stewart
    in

    Problem: You’ve finally found a theme you like but you want to modify it. The modifications are pretty simple but what happens when you want to upgrade the theme? Do you really want to go through all those files again hunting down the changes? Don’t you wish you could just upgrade and be done with…

  • Hide all your links

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    Ian Stewart
    in

    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…

  • Thematic Version 0.3

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    Ian Stewart
    in

    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…

  • How To Add Gravatars For The Post Author in WordPress

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    Ian Stewart
    in

    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: Pretty simple, huh? get_the_author_email outputs the…

  • How To Build WP-PageNavi Into Your WordPress Theme

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    Ian Stewart
    in

    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…

  • We Need To Kill The Sidebar

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    Ian Stewart
    in

    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

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    Ian Stewart
    in

    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

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    Ian Stewart
    in

    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…

  • A Proposal for Theme Management in WordPress

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    Ian Stewart
    in

    The handling of plugins in WordPress 2.5 is perfect. It’s superb. It’s easy. It’s cake. But now that I have cake, you know, I want to eat it too. I’ve got a proposal for how upgrading of themes should be handled in WordPress 2.6 (or whenever) using a .org theme repository. Maybe more like a…

  • A Better Spot for The WordPress Meta

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    Ian Stewart
    in

    One of the first things many new blog owners do is remove the Meta section from their sidebars. Great idea. The Meta information is almost completely useless. And I’m not the only one that thinks so. The Meta section includes some admin links like “Login” or “XHTML Valid.” While those links might be useful for…

  • The Future of WordPress Themes 2008

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    Ian Stewart
    in

    Hey There! If you haven’t yet, make sure you check out The Future of WordPress Themes 2009 after you’re done reading 2008’s predictions. It’s a good read. When I predicted the downfall of premium WordPress themes I immediately began to think of the future of WordPress theming in general. Where was it headed really? And…