A quick post to show what I just discovered. Recently I had a case where I needed to show a static coming soon page for non logged-in visitors, but had to show the fully working theme to admin users because the development was done live.
A little Googling got me to this WordPress Maintenance Mode Without a Plugin tutorial by Sivel. It’s a three parts, real quick tutorial that allows for:
- Maintenance mode both for a certain or indefinite duration.
- Style-able maintenance mode notification page.
- Show normal blog to logged-in users.
- Easily turned-off maintenance mode, since you just add a few files to the WordPress installation and can delete those when you’re done.
Another neat things is that it is done using a maintenance mode mechanism already built-in in WordPress (didn’t know it has that). It works just as expected and when the development is done I can remove the files (only two of them) and everything will be back to normal.
Additionally, another simple way to do this is to serve/create a different, maintenance style theme for non-logged in visitors. User Theme is a plugin that allows for that, but I have yet to test how it works.
I’m sure this is a pretty common situation, so how do you guys do it?
So you want to get your themes ready for the newly released Apple iPad? Worry not, take a deep breath and follow this simple checklist:
- Do nothing.
Done. And no, that is not a joke. Generally you won’t have to do anything since iPad’s Mobile Safari is a full-fledged browser comparable to desktop browsers, supporting modern web practices of (X)HTML/CSS/JS and even HTML5 and CSS3.
There are some points I want to mention, though: design consideration, specific things you can do on iPad’s browser, and more.
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Hey there! WPLover is now sporting a brand new theme (for the RSS subscriber folks, come take a look!) Aesthetically I do not have a problem with the previous theme, and it’s foolish to redesign just for the sake of having a new look, but there are various things I want to improve and it turns out the best way is to build a new theme. Here are some thoughts and notes that come with this redesign.
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This site’s current design sucks when it comes to showcasing new comments, so in the meanwhile here’s Matt clarifying on a old post about whether Gravatar slows down page load speed and hurt search engine rankings:
…Gravatars (or any images) aren’t going to hurt you in the Google rankings or we would have seen a massive drop-off in traffic on WP.com.
True, because as far as I know page load speed isn’t taken into account yet. And when it is, Gravatars will be just one of the many other factors that influence load speed anyway.
It looks like Pico wins something (yay!), so to celebrate here’s an update for it, bringing it to version 1.0.7. The improvements are:
- The home page now shows previous and next posts navigation links.
- Better top header menu, now using the bulletproof Page-based navigation technique.
- Better 404 page. Now shows a search box and some useful links.
- New widget area, Pico Single Bottom. It’s located right below a single Post, great for things like social sharing widgets, related posts, and so on.
- Style for Visual Editor (a.k.a WYSIWYRG), so the text you see on the editor looks more similar to the actual design, thanks to Oz’s guide.
- A bunch of typographic and design tweaks.
Download Pico directly here, or visit the theme’s landing page.
Enjoy!
Nowadays pretty much everybody is using pretty permalinks while also using the much shorter url.com?p=page_id format for the short URL of the same post, usually on Twitter. You can also use the various URL shortening services, of course, but Zeldman’s article explains why it’s good to roll your own short URL:
Rolling your own mini-URLs lessens the chance that your carefully cultivated links will rot if the third-party URL shortening site goes down or goes out of business
This post will show you a few more unique keywords (not just “p”) that you can use to shorten your URL with WordPress. You don’t need to do anything to get these keywords to work; they’re available to any WordPress install and will still work regardless of your Permalinks setting.
p
Links to a certain Post / Page.
Usage: url.com/?p=(Post or Page’s ID)
Example: wplover.com?p=1426
m
Either links to Posts from an entire year or an entire month.
Usage:
- To link to a certain month’s Posts: url.com/?p=(YYYYMM)
- To link to a certain year’s Posts: url.com/?p=(YYYY)
Example:
wplover.com/?m=201001
wplover.com/?m=2010
cat
Links to Posts from a certain category.
Usage: url.com/?cat=(Category ID)
Example: wplover.com?cat=3
tag
Links to Posts tagged with a certain tag. Note that you use slug instead of ID here.
Usage: url.com/?tag=(Tag slug)
Example: wplover.com?tag=awesome
s
Links to search results for your supplied keyword.
Usage: url.com/?s=(Keyword)
Example: wplover.com?s=design
Any other short URL keyword I missed?
This small tutorial will try to replicate the famous and recently popular Date Display Technique with Sprites, but opting to do it with CSS 3 instead. The advantage of the CSS 3 method is that:
- You don’t have to create CSS image sprites.
- No more sprites limitation. With image sprites the year is limited, the font selection is fixed, the month name is limited to English words only, and so on. With this technique everything can be shown.
- The CSS is much shorter and understandable.
This only works with modern browsers that support CSS3, of course.
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