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!

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

Joost de Valk warned that he’d been restoring a bunch of 2.7.1 WordPress blogs from hack attempts lately. Symptomps were

iframes being added to the end of all index.php files in the blogs, in the footer. In some cases they were written with javascript, in other cases they were pure iframes.

Lynne Pope also reported another hacked 2.7.1. So far there’s no clear answer how and what this hack does. There’s a possibility that the attack originated from improperly configured shared-hosting issue, instead of a WP specific hack, but it’s mostly a guess now.

Joost also announced his latest plugin that adds a new WP Dashboard widget displaying plugin download statistics from WordPress.org. The current download page is here.

John Biddle started a discussion on WP’s front end performance.

John Sessford found a single page on a WP install that made about 275 database queries, making it very slow to load. Mark Jaquith gave a small how-to on displaying the details of all queries on a WP install. It could also be done with a plugin, Frank Bueltge added.

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

Dave Jaggy asked about custom taxonomies, which seems to be coming in 2.8. In the meanwhile, there’s Brian Krausz‘s plugin to do the job.

Alex Polite asked about ways to use a certain language inside the admin interface, and another language on the blog.

Jennifer Hodgdon had a problem following the Codex’s article on internationalizing plugin’s metadata. Turned out the article is somewhat outdated with missing instructions and files. You might want to read the thread if you’re having the same issue.

Jennifer also tried to dig deeper on registering plugin options. There seemed to be a lack of info on this right now.

Also, this is somewhat nice. Jeremy Visser found an old WordPress 1.5 inside his file server, dated in 2005, the day he first downloaded WP. He then wrote a heartfelt note to the WordPress community.

I love Thematic and I think it’s a lot of great things in one package. And here’s a little something I did.

A Simple Love is a minimalistic, lighthearted 3 columns Thematic child theme with dashes of light blue and dark pink here and there. The goal is to provide better readability, less visual clutter, and simply to be pleasing to look at.

Demo and Download

For the demo, check out WPLover with A Simple Love activated.

Grab your copy of A Simple Love this way!

Installation

To use this theme, simply upload both the latest version of Thematic and A Simple Love into the usual wp-content/themes/ directory. Go to Appearance within your WordPress dashboard and A Simple Love should be available there ready to be activated.

Thanks and Have Fun!

Let me know if you have any suggestions to this theme! In the meanwhile, you might also want to read Ian’s excellent child theme write up to learn more about this subject.

Alternate Color Schemes

Hey, here’s a monochrome, green and yellow version of this theme. Check them out!

Doug Stewart started the discussion on using WordPress for user-generated collaborative websites.  Some ideas were thrown in, including the usage of TDO Mini Forms plugin to help the job.

Mike Schinkel found out that an archive page for a month with no post returns an 404 error. Discussion followed.

Malaiac asked: What is the oldest available file in WordPress (meaning that the file existed since the earliest version of WP)? And it seems like the /wp-admin is the answer (MichaelH also pointed to a really old, WP 0.71 zip file for further checking).