Rambling Thoughts on Tumblr, WordPress, Posterous, Pinterest and Blogging

Khoi Vinh:

[...] I’ve never been a heavy WordPress user until now. I have to admit, its most recent version is full of the fun, geeky features that I like as a blogger, stuff that allows designer-editors to fully tweak the way content is output. It’s great.

Theme Options – Friend or Foe?

It’s getting quite clear now that the 2012 trend on WordPress theme is less theme options,

Minimising theme options used in themes, coupled with careful consideration of a component’s application in the theme and a selective placement of WordPress filters, allows for a richer theme setup experience for our users while still adding a level of flexibility that is possible to hone in on, should you wish to do so.

…but smarter themes that understand your needs better. Read the rest of the WooThemes post here.

WPCandy’s Completely Unofficial Guide to Plugin UI

Plenty of good ideas here.

Don’t steal my Theme Options

Andy Adam discusses his experience tweaking and modifying his theme’s options page to better fit the “zero configuration” philosophy. Respect to the Theme Foundry to go to this length thinking about how their theme should work, not just look, for their users.

WordPress End User Security

Dre Armeda’s presentation at the Reno-Tahoe WordCamp 2011. Required reading.

On Pagination Navigation

Kottke ruminates about how to properly format a pagination navigation.

UpThemes Framework, a GPL 2.0-licensed theme options framework for WordPress

This is the kind of framework I’d really love to use: a theme options framework. A wonderful share by UpThemes. Go grab it here.

TwentyEleven Theme

For a while now, a kickass theme has been available for WordPress.com users, called the Duster theme. This theme has been converted for WordPress.org users and seems to be given a new name, the TwentyEleven.

Theming for the Masses

I got plenty of good design and code considerations in this slideshow from Wordcamp Seattle 2011, by Michael Fields. I wish there’s a presentation video somewhere.

Join the WordPress theme review team

Justin Tadlock invites you to join the WordPress theme review team. Any theme submitted to the WordPress.org Theme Directory gets reviewed by this team first, and the deluge of new themes is tough to handle by this small team of twelve.

I am not part of the team, but I’ve taken a look at their process. Being part of the team is without a doubt one of the best way to learn to be a world-class WordPress theme developer. You will learn so much, you begin to notice flaws even in the most popular WordPress themes, and instantly know how to make a better one.

Don’t Mimic Real-World Interfaces

Ben Brooks talks about how creating realistic looking interfaces (like OSX Lion’s iCal) is not necessarily the best option:

It’s great that you spent 16 hours making that wood grain and stainless steel look exactly like the real thing — looks nice — but does your app work? Does your app make sense?

In terms of theme design, things are more lenient. I’d say that we can have a design based on real life objects, sceneries, and so on. But the novelty of it should not take priority over how well the design communicates a site’s content.

Especially important since soon enough, we will stop distinguishing between a website and an app.

What’s wrong with paid WordPress Themes: WooThemes vs ElegantThemes

Not only do the handy internal configuration tools for “quick customization” give clients every opportunity to break their own sites, they carry a lot of overhead. Your CSS files will be bloated as you are always offering the code for two column, three column and six or seven different colours.

The upshot is that these themes are generally not coded for best loading time. They have to include and do so many things (CSS, JS, queries) to cover all the possible combinations due to their huge set of features, every time you open a page, regardless whether you use these features or not!

It’s not that having plenty of features is bad. It’s the inefficiency that can be disadvantageous to the end users.

Technical Web Typography: Guidelines and Techniques

Recommended bookmark material. Covers the technical aspects of setting up typography on the web.

Designing Faster with a Baseline Grid

I’m to working with vertical grid. Not so with adding baseline grid, though, despite it being the key to having a typographic rhythm:

Building a horizontal grid is of course a fundamental step, but creating vertical rhythm is equally important. As Robert Bringhurst wrote in The Elements of Typographic Style: “Don’t compose without a scale”. Type should actually be the scale that defines almost everything else.

Read the article, and directly download their grid here.

Know Your Type: Myriad

Eugene Mosier, production art director at the time praised the typeface for its “proletarian feel,” appropriately dubbing Myriad the “Volkswagen bug of typefaces.”

Read the article here.

Best-Designed Newspaper

Creating a newspaper/magazine-style layout? Take a peek at the World’s Best-Designed Newspaper.

Migrating Your Current WordPress Blog to a WordPress Multisite Blog

Some people want to migrate from normal blog to a Multisite but it is indeed seems complicated. So here’s a detailedly written article, with a helpful video.

Jetpack

Jetpack by Automattic is a plugin that gives your WordPress site features from WordPress.com. I like it, as the features are quite nice and it should be useful for people transitioning from WordPress.com to self-hosted one.

Improve your WordPress Navigation Menu Output

A tutorial on adding description to your WordPress 3.0 menu links. Might be a nice update for Pico.

Custom Shortlinks for WordPress

Have your own short domain name for the purpose of shortlinking? Here’s an easy way to combine that with your WordPress install.