Author: Philip Arthur Moore

The Further Theme: Now Available On Creative Market

Our friends at Creative Market announced last week that all themes sold on their marketplace are now 100% GPL. We couldn’t be more thrilled about this and send hearty kudos to the gang at CM for doing the right thing.

To show our support, we’ve jumped into the fray by offering for the first time ever a WordPress.com premium theme for self-hosted WordPress blogs. Further was designed and developed by our very own Takashi Irie. He put his heart and soul into the work, and oh boy does it ever show.

Further: Home Page

For everyone who’s been asking when Further, which really shines with Jetpack, will be available for self-hosted blogs, you now have your answer. We hope you’ll love Further as much as our beloved users on WordPress.com do and can’t wait to see the amazing blogs that you build with it.

_s Version 1.3 Ready For Download

I’m happy to announce that _s 1.3 is ready for download on both Underscores.me and GitHub. The most notable changes introduced during the last two versions are basic support for Infinite Scroll, theme customizer integration, and additional Post Formats.

There was no blog post published for _s 1.2, so consider the following notes to be a brief overview of fixes and enhancements performed on _s since version 1.1:

Version 1.3:

– Basic support for Infinite Scroll (ref.)
– Add additional Post Formats into functions.php (ref.)
– Provide context for comments title strings (ref.)

The following files changed from Version 1.2 to Version 1.3:

404.php
README.md
comments.php
functions.php
image.php
inc/jetpack.php
inc/template-tags.php
style.css

You can also run the following command in Terminal to see a log of file changes between Version 1.2 and Version 1.3:

git diff --name-only 7b7489 f1e9b4

For a full log, visit the commit history page on GitHub.

Version 1.2:

– Theme customizer integration (ref.)
– Add folder into theme for translations and additional instructions into the readme.md file (ref.)

The following files changed from Version 1.1 to Version 1.2:

404.php
README.md
archive.php
comments.php
content-single.php
content.php
footer.php
functions.php
header.php
image.php
inc/custom-header.php
inc/customizer.php
inc/extras.php
inc/jetpack.php
inc/template-tags.php
inc/theme-options/theme-options.php
inc/tweaks.php
index.php
js/customizer.js
js/html5.js
languages/readme.txt
layouts/content-sidebar-sidebar.css
layouts/content-sidebar.css
layouts/sidebar-content-sidebar.css
layouts/sidebar-content.css
layouts/sidebar-sidebar-content.css
no-results.php
page.php
readme.txt
search.php
searchform.php
single.php
style.css

You can also run the following command in Terminal to see a log of file changes between Version 1.1 and Version 1.2:

git diff --name-only f1e9b4 175ef5

For a full _s commit log, visit the commit history page on GitHub.

There are open issues that we’d like to revisit for _s 1.4, namely post format archive labeling (ref.) and a load of other Open Issues.

Please jump into the ongoing discussions on GitHub and if there’s an issue with _s that has not been raised yet, feel free to open it up.

WordPress Query Comprehensive Reference

There are a couple of spots that I always keep handy when looking for information about WordPress’ query handling. Consider this Gist an addition to my list:

WordPress Query Comprehensive Reference

Which helpful, recent resources do you use for information about WordPress’ query? I prefer to hit the Codex (WP_Query and query_posts) and also just dig directly into wp-includes/query.php.

Internationalization: You’re Probably Doing It Wrong

Fun fact of the day: about 37% of WordPress downloads are for non-English, localized versions.

So as a plugin or theme author, you should be thinking of localization and internationalization (L10N and I18N) as pretty much a fact of life by this point.

An excellent post from Otto on improvements to make and pitfalls to look out for when performing i18n on your WordPress theme.

On Breaking and Fixing WordPress Themes at WordCamp Singapore 2011

My coworkers at Automattic and I frequently discuss the speed with which we’re able to onboard new themes into the WordPress.com theme directory.

Our top priority as the Theme Team is to make sure that all of our users feel like they have a theme that fits them perfectly; in order to meet that goal we’re focused on bringing a variety of themes into WordPress.com through a few primary channels: the WordPress.org theme directory; premium theme shops; and Automattic (in-house) themes.

It’s often the case that each conversion—that is, making a theme’s code WordPress.com-safe and ready—will take us anywhere between one week and one month, depending on the complexity and quality of the code. In a perfect world, though, we’d be able to snap our fingers and have every single awesome-looking theme available on WP.com right now.

Continue reading “On Breaking and Fixing WordPress Themes at WordCamp Singapore 2011”

* { box-sizing: border-box; } FTW

Paul Irish on HTML element widths being inclusive of padding at all times. That is to say if I define my box as 200 pixels wide then it should stay at a total of 200 pixels, no matter what I use for its padding value.

The money shot is as follows:

* { /* apply a natural box layout model to all elements */
	-moz-box-sizing: border-box;
	-webkit-box-sizing: border-box;
	box-sizing: border-box;
}

Also, an interesting read on using * and its impact on performance.

You might get up in arms about the universal * selector. Apparently you’ve heard its slow. Firstly, it’s not. It is as fast as h1 as a selector. It can be slow when you specifically use it like .foo > *, so don’t do that. Aside from that, you are not allowed to care about the performance of * unless you concatenate all your javascript, have it at the bottom, minify your css and js, gzip all your assets, and losslessly compress all your images. If aren’t getting 90+ Page Speed scores, its way too early to be thinking about selector optimization.

As with most CSS, there’s no one-size-fits-all choice for this. At times it makes sense (it’s used on the WordPress.com Theme Showcase, selectively though) and at other times it doesn’t.

I like it, though.

Head over to Irish’s site to weigh in or drop a comment here with your thoughts.