Sometimes it’s a good idea to modify the permalink of a post to make it more concise but still understandable, and WordPress allows you to change your permalink directly on your write post/page panel via the small form under the title area. Usually, since permalinks are written in this-kind-of-format-with-dashes, I would have to write that way manually: must carefully keep them lowercased and dashed properly.

However, I just found out that you could simply write your title normally there (with alternating cases and spaces, even):

And WordPress will automatically prettify the permalink for you:

Nice usability, there. To whoever coded this into WP, I humbly thank you.

Sophia gets the honor of being one of the available themes for BuddyPress, so I go and do some CSS modification so it works better there.

If you’re using Sophia on standalone WordPress, the update includes non-BuddyPress specific CSS fixes too.

Download the update here.

Sophia is an elegant, minimalistic child theme for Ian Stewart’s Thematic. It’s a two column theme (right sidebar) and is based on the latest version of Thematic (0.9.5.1 as of this post).

Wait. Are You Sure You Want to Install This Theme?

Note that there’s no fancy graphics to distract your readers. No big ugly Twitter/Subscribe/whatever buttons. No Web 2.0 gradients. No abstract, colorful backgrounds. No intricately drawn icons.

Nope.

Sophia is all about your content.

It wraps your ideas in tasteful typography and minimal decorations, then it gets out of the way completely.

Choose Sophia if you believe in substance over style.

Choose Sophia if you need the least friction between your reader and your writings.

Choose Sophia if you want your writing to be the main showcase, the way it should be.

Demo and Download

Demo | Download

Installation

1. Download Thematic and upload it into your theme folder.
2. Download Sophia theme above and upload it into your theme folder.
3. Go into your WordPress Dashboard, select Appearance and activate Sophia.

If you don’t have any idea how to upload a new theme, here’s a tutorial for you.

A Work in Progress

Sophia is a work in progress, as there are some edge cases not yet covered (some obscure CSS stylings, among other things). Feel free to comment and share your ideas below.

Also, you might want to subscribe to wplover to get further updates about Sophia. To be truthful you will probably be deluged with many WordPress-related posts before you get that update, but it’s not like it’s a bad thing, no?

Anyways, enjoy!

There are tons of themes available at the Free Themes Directory, 1052 of them last I checked. How many of them are actually modified version of GPL-licensed so-called premium themes? Not many, I’d say.

Which is a shame. While it’s a good exercise to create your own theme from scratch, it’s much more efficient to just take a good premium theme filled with lots of nice features and modify it according to your own taste and idea. Here’s why:

1. A lot of thoughts has been put into such themes. Useful features, layout considerations, standards-based HTML code, all ready for you to re-use. Stand on the shoulder of the giants.
2. Features. Features features features. That’s what premium themes are made of, and you can have it too with little to no coding involved.
3. HTML/CSS folks with no experience with PHP can do it too. Just modify the CSS without touching the code. Most of the time this means creating child themes, but I don’t see a problem with releasing a full theme, one that is a CSS-modified version of another theme. Better designed themes is a full win for everyone.
4. It saves you time and energy. How many times can you code that comments.php file without losing sanity, anyway?
5. You are free to do it, that’s the point of a GPL license. With more premium themes licensed under GPL, there’s no reason not to take advantage of it. Creating a mod that improves on a theme is nice, but not a requirement. Just experiment and have fun doing it.
6. Most premium themes have a good documentation readily available. Learn a lot while modifying them, and you can use it as additional resources for people downloading your modded theme.
7. I don’t know about you, but if I read “my work is based on a WooThemes theme”, I’m going to pay attention, a lot. There are strong brand associations coming with premium themes. Use it for your world domination plan advantage.

What Kind of Modifications Should I Make?

It’s up to you. Make those themes look sweeter, some of them need it so bad. Lose the garish gradients. Simplify. Add more widgetized area. Offer more layout options, especially if there’s a few already, complete with the theme options for it. Sprinkle some fancy CSS3 or JQuery magic. Add author info section. Threaded comments.

Among other things.

Resources

Premium Mod is doing what I’m talking about here. They are new, so there are still a few mods available. Look around to have an idea of what you can do.

Here’s a list of commercially supported WordPress themes. Plenty of choices.

Conclusion

We have so, so many free WordPress themes, most of them could really use a quality improvement (yeah, including mine). Modding premium themes is a good way to take the quality of WordPress themes into the next level, while at the same time is relatively easier and less time consuming to do for developers.

Everybody wins, so why not?

Writing Secure Plugins by Mark Jaquith.

Creating Community with BuddyPress by Lisa-Sabin Wilson

BuddyPress Groups API by Andy Peatling.

How to in WPMU: Building a blog directory & Domain Mapping by Andrea Rennick.

Will update when more’s available.

I notice there are quite a lot of interest for A Simple Love, a child theme I made for the famous Thematic theme. So here you can get A Simple Love in three different color schemes: Mono, Green and Yellow version.

Preview

Monochrome | Green | Yellow

Downloads

Monochrome | Green | Yellow

These are separate themes and can be installed separately. Remember that you need to have Thematic installed in your themes folder too to get these child themes working.

Enjoy!

I recently changed this site’s permalink format from wplover.com/postname to wplover.com/post-id/postname. At first this is simply done because I’m curious, but it turns out there are a couple of advantages to this:

• Using post ID is good: “…it is best to start your permalink structure with a numeric field, such as the year or post ID.” (source)
  I’ve read somewhere that /post-id/postname/ is faster than /postname/ to process because using the latter there is no difference between a Post and a Page permalink, so WordPress have to take the time to check for that as well. If you use /post-id/postname/, the link structure for a Page will be /pagetitle/ (without ID). Try as I might, I can’t find the source from this information, so please correct me if I’m wrong.
• …and the whole point of this post: you can use yourdomain/post-id/ as a short url, useful to post to Twitter and the like. Here’s an example: http://wplover.com/632/

How will using that post-id based short URL affect SEO, though? To find out, I tried to dig into WordPress’ code that redirects the short URL into the actual URL. This is from wp-includes\canonical.php line 202 (as of WordPress 2.8.x):

if ( $do_redirect ) {
// protect against chained redirects
if ( !redirect_canonical($redirect_url, false) ) {
wp_redirect($redirect_url, 301);

So they’re using 301 redirects according to that last line. This is the right way, SEO-wise:

301s are good for SEO value, while 302s aren’t because 301s instruct clients to forget the value of the original URL, while the 302 keeps the value of the original and can thus potentially reduce the value by creating two, logically-distinct URLs that each produce the same content (search engines view them as distinct duplicates rather than a single resource with two names). (source)

301 redirects tells search engines that that short URL and the full URL is the same and not a duplicate, which is good (because duplication reduces the value of both URL).

So, in essence, all’s good, godspeed, have fun with the short URL.