I mentioned in my How to Launch Your WordPress Theme guide that you can use a plugin to let visitor previews a theme applied to your current site (so you don’t have to build your own demo theme). For the current version of wplover I’m using the Theme Preview plugin by Dougal Campbell.

The example from that plugin’s installation guide is pretty simple, you just create a link like this:
http://example.com/index.php?preview_theme=my-theme

If you use custom permalinks (I suppose everyone does it at this point, you remove the “index.php” part:
http://example.com/preview_theme=my-theme

Then, your visitors can use that link to preview that my-theme you have. Now, things get interesting when you want to demo a child theme. This doesn’t get documented clearly, but you can do this to preview child themes:
http://example.com/preview_theme=parent-theme&preview_css=child-theme

It’s that simple. Remember to use the correct names for both the parent and child theme. If you’re not sure, just use the theme’s folder name. Here’s an example for A Simple Love’s demo:

http://wplover.com/preview_theme=thematic&preview_css=a-simple-love

Also remember that you need both the parent and child theme in your wp-content/themes/ directory for this to work.

Welcome to the weekly Hackers Highlight, showcasing various interesting information that happened in the last week of WordPress hacker’s mailing list, wp-hackers. You can also follow the mailing list via the Google Group front-end here.

This could be an idea if you wanted to make a new plugin: Eduardo Zulian needed a way to show a huge amount of categories in the write post admin area. Could be really useful for sites using WP as a CMS with a lot of different categories in play.

Here’s a good discussion on WordPress’ accessibility issue. And related with that discussion, Lynne Pope requested the creation of the wp-accessibility mailing list to further discuss and implement better accessibility into WordPress. Quite obviously a great idea. Let’s hope this comes into reality real soon.

Welcome to the weekly Hackers Highlight, showcasing various interesting information that happened in the last week of WordPress hacker’s mailing list, wp-hackers. You can also follow the mailing list via the Google Group front-end here.

So there was a post on the WP dev blog asking folks for ideas and tweaks to the Dashboard design.  Jane Wells linked to the related WordPress forum thread if you want to contribute or just follow the discussion. The 2.8 navigation design guidelines are available here.

Mike Walsh asked for plugins that can handle forms to be included with sign-up activity. TDO Mini Forms and MM Forms were recommended. A bunch of non-WordPress solutions were also suggested.

Here’s Ptah Dunbar with a code snippet on how to automatically activate certain widgets.

There’s also an on-going discussion started by Michael Toppa on how to make a plugin that loads certain CSS only on pages that use that plugin. No definitive solution so far. Any takers?

Welcome to the weekly Hackers Highlight, showcasing various interesting information that happened in the last week of WordPress hacker’s mailing list, wp-hackers. You can also follow the mailing list via the Google Group front-end here.

Did you know the WordPress 24-Hours Has-Patch Marathon a few days before? Here’s a little inside story of what happened in wp-hackers. Some wanted to help but couldn’t because there’s no news posted at the mailing list, and the two days prior announcement post at the WP development blog were simply too short.

Stephen Rider suggested that it is better to revert from using the word “Appearance” back to “Design” inside the Dashboard. The change to “Appearance” happened within the 2.7 redesign, which changed all the menus from verbs to nouns. “Design” is also a noun, he said, and it encompassed the content underneath that menu better: Widgets, for example, are not just appearances but also part of the design of the site. Demetris suggested using the word “Layout” instead. What do you think?

Here’s a discussion on using the WP_Query() to display posts with a certain search term.

Wow, last weekend was quite a hectic one for me, and so this particular article goes out of schedule a bit. Anyways, as usually, this is the weekly Hackers Highlight, showcasing various interesting information that happened in the last week of WordPress hacker’s mailing list, wp-hackers.

First, I found out that the Google Groups frontend version of wp-hackers is a much pleasant version to read and link to, so I’m going to use that from now on.

Liraz Siri was working on including WordPress inside TurnKey Linux and then asked what plugins needs to be included with it. And so a bunch of WP hackers recommend their own list of good plugins to have when starting a new WP blog.

Shane A. Froebel released the wireframe document for the new Media Management System for WordPress 2.9.x. Sounds great. It’s on his blog, and also available as a PDF file (direct link, this one).

Here’s a nice and short discussion on best practices for using wp_enqueue_script and wp_enqueue_style, started by Michael Toppa.

Joost de Valk asked about some information on the syntax of WXR. Surprisingly, there is no such definitive resource anywhere!

This is the weekly Hackers Highlight, showcasing various interesting information that happened in the last week of WordPress hacker’s mailing list, wp-hackers.

Chris Jean questioned whether it’s possible to hide the parent of a child theme in the Manage Themes dashboard area. While this is potentially useful to avoid user confusion (so that they don’t activate the parent theme when they should be activating the child one), I don’t think this is a particularly necessary issue. Users might not even understand what a parent/child theme is: just tell them precisely what theme to activate, and that’s it.

Joost de Valk offered a small fix so that /wp-includes/link-template.php uses less database query. Nice catch.

Ptah Dunbar asked whether there’s a WordPress UI guidelines somewhere. Apparently there is one, except that it’s written in German. Anyone interested to do an English version?

Mike Schinkel found out that WordPress always run a query for posts regardless of whether you need it or not (say, if you’re using a custom query). The discussion that follows talked about ways to disable the query_posts() function.

So you’ve completed your next great WordPress theme. You’ve tested them day and night, squashing bugs and CSS inconsistencies along the way. Your fingers are trembling, waiting for the time to release that theme to the wild.

What next?

Get the news out

1. The first thing to do is to write about it in your website. Either as a blog post or a specific page, it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s there. This is to be the home page of the theme, which will serve a bunch of purpose: you include the link to this page inside the theme’s style.css, you link to it when announcing your theme, people can come to it to comment and ask around if they encounter some problems, and so on.
2. Send your theme to the WordPress Theme Directory. Pretty much the go to site for WordPress themes, make sure to upload your theme there for more exposure. You might want to check the guidelines first, though. When you’re done, it will take a few days (based on my limited experience) for the review process to kick in before your theme is included in the Directory. Unfortunately, the Directory does not support uploading of Child Themes yet AFAIK, so if yours is a Child Theme, you might want to skip this step for now.
3. Announce it on Weblog Tools Collection’s News forum. You will need to register to the forum first (but hey, it’s free) before you can submit your theme there. Take a look around at how other people do it: basically all it takes is a little summary and link to the theme’s home page. You can also submit Child Themes here. When you’re done, give it a few days and your themes will likely to be included in WLTC’s regularly updated new themes post, giving you a lot of traffic in the process.

Let people test it before they have it

1. First of all, it’s good to know that the Theme Directory provides a download and a demo link of your theme, so you can just use theirs if you’re so inclined. However, since the Theme Directory takes time to include a theme, you might want to provide a temporary demo/download on your theme’s home page as well.
2. If you’re planning to release a lot of themes, it might be a good idea to create your own test site, add a dummy content into it, and upload your themes there.
3. After that, you can use various different plugins that allow visitor to test your themes. You can try Theme Preview, Theme Test Drive, Theme Preview, or User Theme.
4. If you’re too lazy/busy to make a separate site, then hey, your very own blog can be the test site. This is what I do. With the Theme Test Drive plugin, it’s just a matter of appending “?theme=themename” to your site’s URL to change the theme. Do read the documentation first!
5. While a simple download link is sufficient, you might want to add a download manager plugin to give you more statistics on how many times it has been downloaded, and so on. I use the Download Monitor plugin for this.

My workflow

This is how I do it, probably not the most efficient way, but it might give you an idea of what the steps are.

1. Write the blog post. Don’t publish it yet. Instead, tweak the permalink and use that link for the theme’s style.css THEME URI.
2. Upload the theme into the current site.
3. Open a new tab, upload the zipped theme into the Download Monitor.
4. Configure the Theme Test Drive and test it so it can show the demo correctly.
5. Back to the blog post: add the download and demo link.
6. Publish the post. Here goes nothing.
7. Submit the theme to Theme Directory.
8. Announce it to WLTC’s news forum.
9. Done. Sit back and wait for people to come.

What about yours?

I’m sure a lot of you guys out there have more experience in launching your themes. Do share your very own tips and tricks in the comment area, alright?

Translated Version

Read this article in Italian, translated by Danny of altamentedecorativo.com. Thanks, Danny!