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.
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.
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.
Display Author Gravatar in the Loop
If you want to display an author’s Gravatar, this little code should do the trick (note that it only works inside the Loop):
<?php echo get_avatar( get_the_author_meta('user_email'), 48 ); ?> |
The second parameter dictates the size of the avatar. More about get_avatar().
The Disappearing Meta Value Issue
I’ve been using this Tutplus tutorial to create custom post types, especially the part about creating custom post input. It works nicely, except for the fact that the meta values entered with that input can get deleted completely by WordPress when it autosaves a post. Or if you Quick Edit a post.
It seems to be a WordPress bug Fortunately, someone posted a fix on the comment area. It’s pretty self-explanatory.
There’s also a Trac ticket discussing it, there you can find a more correct fix involving the use of nonces.
How to Get your Post Thumbnail’s Width and Height
In Settings > Media, you are able to set only the height or width of the Thumbnail images and WordPress will resize them proportionally (i.e.: if you have a fixed height, then the widths will vary depending on your uploaded image dimension, and vice versa).
Inside the loop, you can get a thumbnail’s width, height and URL using this code:
$imgdata = wp_get_attachment_image_src( get_post_thumbnail_id(), 'thumbnail' ); $imgurl = $imgdata[0]; // the url of the thumbnail picture $imgwidth = $imgdata[1]; // thumbnail's width $imgheight = $imgdata[2]; // thumbnail's height |
For the second parameter of the wp_get_attachment_image_src function you can also use ‘medium’, ‘large’ and ‘full’. They correspond to the dimension for the other sizes in Settings > Media.
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.
