Tag Archives: Themes

Post thumbnails changes

By Dougal | Published: December 11, 2009

If you visited my site in the last 9 hours and found it displaying nothing but an error message, my apologies. It’s part of the danger of running my site out of the WordPress SVN trunk (i.e., beta code), and taking advantage of new features.

My site automatically pulls in the latest code changes from SVN at midnight. And it seems that sometime yesterday, all of the post_image_* functions were renamed to post_thumbnail_*, and I failed to wrap one of my function calls with function_exists() protection. [...]

Posted in WordPress | Also tagged Beta, downtime, features, functions, images, thumbnails, WordPress | 8 Comments

WordPress 2.9 Features

By Dougal | Published: October 16, 2009

This site is now running on WordPress 2.9-rare (which is our “pre-alpha” designation, for those of you who don’t know). WP 2.9 is in “feature freeze”, which means no new features will be considered for this version, and the developers will concentrate on finishing up the existing new features and any outstanding bugs. So far, it appears that all of my plugins are working just fine.

The main new features I’ve actually seen so far are the addition of the “Post Thumbnail” box in the writing screen, the new “trash” status for posts, pages, and comments, and the image editor in the Media Library. [...]

Posted in WordPress | Also tagged alpha, Beta, cms, content management, content types, Development, embeds, features, Flickr, hulu, images, Media, Metadata, oembed, Plugins, qik, testing, thumbnails, viddler, vimeo, viper, viper007bond, Widgets, WordPress, youtube | 82 Comments

Retheme: Stage 1

By Dougal | Published: August 17, 2009

I’ve pulled the trigger on the first stage of my site re-theme.

Right now, it’s still a pretty clean slate. I’ve switched over to the Thematic theme (actually a child theme using Thematic as its template), and done just a few quick stylesheet fixes and personal plugin tweaks. . [...]

Posted in WordPress | Also tagged branding, CSS, self, stylesheets, WordPress | 3 Comments

Time for Redesign

By Dougal | Published: August 5, 2009

I’ve been threatening to do it for years, but I think it’s really time — time to redesign this site, for real. If what I have now (or will accomplish in the end) can be called ‘design’. Maybe it would be better to say ‘re-theme‘, so as to avoid ridicule from actual designers. And speaking of which, I’ll happily accept any design advice along the way!

So. [...]

Posted in WordPress | Also tagged carrington, childtheme, CSS, Design, Frameworks, ianstewart, reboot, rockemsockem, thematic, WordPress | 10 Comments

WordPress theme licensing

By Dougal | Published: July 2, 2009

There is finally an official answer to the question of whether or not WordPress themes must “inherit” the GPL license that WordPress itself uses. Matt asked the Software Freedom Law Center to examine the WordPress source and how themes fit in. The final, official answer to whether themes must be GPL? Yes and no. [...]

Posted in WordPress | Also tagged copyright, CSS, freedom, freedomzero, gpl, images, JavaScript, Law, Legal, license, licensing, PHP, WordPress | 13 Comments

WordPress Themes Tutorial

By Dougal | Published: July 1, 2009

If you aren’t already following along, I highly recommend checking out the How To Create A WordPress Theme tutorial series by Ian Stewart (ThemeShaper.com). This 12-part series (8 complete at the time of this writing) aims to take you from nothing to a fully functional, semantically rich, flexible WordPress theme in digestible chunks. [...]

Posted in WordPress | Also tagged beginners, CSS, howto, html, lessons, Microformats, Semantics, templates, tutorial, WordPress | 9 Comments

What’s the buzz?

By Dougal | Published: June 1, 2009

Here’s a quick post, just to let everybody know that I’m still alive.

During my long silence here, a lot of things have been happening in the WordPress community. First and foremost is the upcoming WordPress 2.8 release. There are several nifty new features in there. The most notable (for me) are probably:

Built-in theme browser/installer
Drag-n-drop widget management
Syntax highlighting when using theme/plugin editor
Image cropping in media uploader
New theme functions for author metadata
New OOP WP_Widget framework for plugin authors
More support for custom taxonomies
New combined i18n/escaping theme functions
Script loading improvements

The first four are the main “visible” features for this release. [...]

Posted in WordPress | Also tagged Beta, cms, Development, features, taxonomies, webdev, Widgets, WordPress | 9 Comments

The Future of WordPress Themes

By Dougal | Published: March 2, 2009

A couple of months ago, Ian Stewart asked me to be one of the voices for this year’s roundup on The Future of WordPress Themes 2009. There were a variety of angles from which to look at the subject, so it’s interesting to see how everyone interpreted the question.

There are discussions about “Premium” themes and the GPL, about whether plugin functionality belongs in themes, and about seperation of presentation and content, among other things. [...]

Posted in WordPress | Also tagged future, ianstewart, opinion, themeshaper, WordPress | 27 Comments

Book Review: WordPress for Business Bloggers

By Dougal | Published: November 12, 2008

I recently received a copy of the book WordPress for Business Bloggers, by Paul Thewlis, published by Packt Publishing. [...]

Posted in WordPress | Also tagged Advertising, analytics, bloggers, book, Business, packt, paulthewlis, Plugins, Review, SEO, WordPress | 19 Comments

WordPress themes for developers

By Dougal | Published: October 29, 2008

This is the article that I had originally intended to post last week, before I suffered a self-induced glitch which caused me to lose my work-in-progress. Thanks to my friend Geof Morris who prompted me to double-check my database for saved revisions. As it turns out, there was indeed a revision stored there which did not show up in the list of revisions given in the editor. [...]