WordPress Theme repository

Oh well, WordPress > extend > themes seems to have ground to a halt, temporary or otherwise, fairly early on in its bright new career - which is a pity, if this is going to be the advertised “good centralized place” - a job that weblogtoolscollection does rather well on a much more ad hoc basis.

Of course, I wouldn’t want the job of verifying that lot of submissions, paid or unpaid

Free WordPress Theme: Ringbinder

RingBinder is a 2 column fixed-width, free WordPress theme, with righthand sidebar, enabled for widgets - the name is reasonably self-explanatory.

The theme is compatible with WordPress 2.3, 2.5 and 2.5.1, and has been tested on Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 6 and 7, and Opera 9.

Demonstration: RingBinder Demo
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wp_list_pages errors WordPress 2.5 and 2.6

In the course of producing a theme that uses wp_list_pages for the standard menu, with a whole list of args, including exclude, as documented here, I find a series of non-standard behaviours - particularly when using a .mo file in the theme directory and in /wp-content/languages/

This is only with wp_list_pages for 2.5 upwards, WordPress 2.3 versions, not a problem, doing exactly what it’s supposed to…

The “official” radar seems to have no interest in the matter, so I was wondering whether any one could report their experiences…?

WordPress for iPhone

As trumpeted here - I may be gadget-illiterate but hasn’t this iPhone thing been out for about a year? Why the arrival now?

Or has the memory been upgraded to the dizzy heights of 0.1MB or whatever - allowing these wonders to occur…?

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WordPress 2.6

A month ahead of schedule - which may or may not be a good thing - and coming complete with its own video for the youngsters.

What looks very good is the new plugin interface which  divides active and inactive plugins, felt by many to be overdue.

Apparently, and this is only horrible rumour at this stage - the medium-vaunted login system isn’t doing for Firefox 3.0…

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WordPress as CMS and PHP

If you’re using WordPress as a CMS and doing some extra coding - for example picking something from an extra db table to display on a certain page, eg page_id=4

$pageVar = $wpdb->get_var(SELECT var FROM my_table WHERE something=’something_else’);

and then you also want to SEO the <title> a little, so in header.php you put:-

<?php if (is_page(’4′)) $extraTitle = ‘» ‘ . $pageVar; ?>

<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> <?php wp_title(); ?> <?php echo $extraTitle; ?></title>

It won’t work - $pageVar doesn’t have global scope, because of the method used to get the header on the page.

<?php get_header(); ?>

Instead, one way round this is to use:

<?php include(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/header.php’); ?>

and it will work…
This has the nature of a hack - use sparingly and probably not in themes for general release. And stay away from $_GLOBALS

Fireshot - screen caps via Firefox

Maybe - another entrant to the small and select group of Firefox plugins that actually have some value….

Fireshot has a variety of editing tools that let users modify captured screen shots and add text and graphic notes.

Captured image can be saved to disk, copied to clipboard, emailed or opened in a new editor. File formats which are supported contains .PNG, .GIF, .JPEG, .BMP, etc.

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WordPress theme framework

So the dreaded word “framework” creeps into the WordPress discussion

Framework, I venture to suggest, often means a serious overcomplication of code in the holy names of consistency, effective MVC, semantic accuracy and a few other buzzwords. I’ve had to sort out a fair few sites that used a PHP framework, where a couple of classes and a MySQL function wrapper would have done the job much more efficiently. Read more »

Free WordPress Theme: Poker City

Poker City is Las Vegas, I guess… Poker City is also a 2 column fixed-width free WordPress theme, with righthand sidebar, enabled for widgets.

The theme is compatible with WordPress 2.3, 2.5 and 2.5.1, and has been tested on Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 6 and 7, and Opera 9.
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WordPress 2.6 beta 2

So we’re up to WordPress 2.6 beta 2 - any sign yet of slimming down the jquery and the editor…? - had a client last week who simply couldn’t get the Write Post page loaded on their machine… admittedly a Mac on dialup, the former of which I’m sure makes no difference whatsoever.