WordPress 2.2 has moved from Candidate to Final Release.
One major change is that widgets are now included by default in the core code, rather than being available as a plugin, have apparently been significantly cleaned up, and enabled for the default themes (or vice-versa…).
2.2 doesn’t have the new tagging system, which made a brief appearance - it created issues with, particularly, Ultimate Tag Warrior - reserved for 2.3…
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Weblog Tools Collection provides a useful service - and wants more information about submitted themes - which is reasonable, since there’s at least 5 new themes a day to check out and as with everything, quality can be very variable and is not on a positive gradient.
Mention a timeline, suggested improvements, wishlists, bugfixes, possible problems a user might encounter etc. Please tell us if your theme is a fixed or fluid width, mention the number of columns, mention if it supports widgets as well as the customizable header image. Does it have an options page? Is it adsense ready?
Again, please do mention if your theme is sponsored.
For myself, if confronted with 7 consecutive posts, same theme name, different colors, I assume sponsorship and completely ignore.
Freelanceswitch have a copious list of advice for freelancers, and it’s good - here’s a brief critique of their section on freelance programmers
* Pitch yourself as a developer who understands web designers, because most of them need a developer
Less true nowadays - the halfway-competent freelance web designer will be using CMS software out-of-the-box, you can end up dealing with the less competent end of the market. But never lose the opportunity for these alliances.
* Write a small web app like ta-da list or jobpile and get some recognition
Largely identical to the final point - see below…
* Answer tech questions on forums and use a signature that says you offer freelance coding services
Good advice - but relatively time-consuming and in marketing speak, the quality of leads is abysmally low.
* Enter a programming contest like RailsDay
Prizes, by some magic, come to proteges of the sponsors with monotonous regularity - is this harsh? Possibly… You have to go into this without firm expectations, although dividends can be high…
* Contribute to open source efforts and get known
Absolutely - whether your own app or a well-known ‘brand’, even if it’s just a plugin with a few lines of code, this is the way to get a foothold. It’s something tangible to show prospective clients, it’s absolute proof of your skills. It also gives you feedback for improvement, because you’re not the world’s best just yet.
The discussion concerning sponsored links in WordPress themes has a relevance to the wider question of buying links, and how it plays with the algorithm used by the current market leader in search engines. Google, through their vicar on earth, have set out their position in the usual partial fashion. This seems to be how it is as of now…
It’s vital to note that this applies only to paid links placed, in the opinion of Google, for SEO purposes and not paid links.
Will Google penalise sites who buy links? No Read more »
Interesting and unusual theme from the maker of Spiffty. The title in the metadata box takes a little getting used to, but definitely worth checking out…
Mimetastic is a blue, minimalist, single-column theme. It features a menu at the top of the page instead of a sidebar. It is a fluid-width theme intended to be easy on the eyes and provide a focus on the content of the website instead of its theme.
Available here
Xampp is the best of Open source - and a good way to have a development version of WordPress. When time permits, I’ll get together a guide to installation with particular regard to WordPress. There’s a good one for Xampp Lite on a memory stick here. And also one for WAMP…
For now, life goes much better if it is installed at the root ie C:\xampp\ rather than C:\Program Files\xampp\ (that’s an absolute for Vista, but strongly suggested for XP etc) And don’t dedicate anything as a service.
Some brief initial thoughts… The name is “automattic stats“, not “wordpress stats”, and unless I’m missing something, there’s no visible privacy statement. Maybe it conforms to USA laws on the subject, but since USA laws have no existence for many, if not most, WordPress users, what of this?
The data mining aspect is interesting, in that (especially) with the proposed exposition of the API, wordpress.com would be working for any application that cared to use the service - and since nothing is for nothing…
This development further blurs the boundaries between wordpress.com and .org. For propriety, I do rather feel that this plugin should not be offered on wordpress.org
You have your index.php file (as made here). We need to put the comments in.
1. Download comments.zip and extract the contents (comments.php and comments-popup.php) to your theme directory - again, this is based on the default WordPress theme.
2. We need to add the call to comments.php into the code of index.php
In index.php, find the point in your code where the post output is finished, but before the while comand loops to the next post
It will almost certainly be between </div> of the id=”post” div and the <?php endwhile; ?>
and paste this
<?php comments_template(); ?>
(You could have the comments and form above the post, but this isn’t common…)
Save it all and upload it - the comments and form should be appearing on the individual post pages.
That’s it - that’s a workable Wordpress theme - not very advanced, but something that can be built on. The next thing to explore is the array of template tags that Wordpress offers.
If these tutorials have helped you get started with theme design - please give us a link from your blog, eg…
<a href="http://www.codescheme.net/">WordPress Theme Design</a>
Separate header and footer files - PHP includes
As a programming language, PHP was expressly designed to work in close conjunction with (X)HTML.
A major part of its usefulness are the include functions, where a separate file and its php code is “included” into a main file - (this allows files to be edited independently, or you can even select different files, and therefore different code, to be included depending on your requirements).
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Adding the sidebar to the basic layout.
For simplicity, we’re just going to do 1 sidebar - adding 2,3 sidebars follows the same principles, but with a few complications best left for later.
1. Go to your index.php (from the first wordpress theme tutorial) and cut out the code for the sidebar:- probably something like this
<div id="sidebar">
....
Some dummy text at the moment
....
</div>
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blogs, wordpress | Lewis, 16 May 07 | 
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