WordCamp, Carrington Theme, and Great Design

Over the weekend I was able to go to WordCamp Utah and hear some great talks. I will have a more detailed write-up coming soon. Our weekly resources post will feature a lot of information from those talks. WordCamp Utah Video Stream – http://www.ustream.tv/channel/wordcamp-utah This has all of the videos from the conference. In particular [...]

Creating a WordPress Theme Without Images

What do I mean? If you are creating a basic theme for distribution, consider designing it, or at least offering a variation of it, that is image free. As in style everything with CSS, and don’t resort to images for the layout and design. Why do it? Customization. It makes it so much easier for [...]

Themes, Default Content, WP Coder, and Widgets

How to Create a WordPress Theme From Scratch (Part 2) – http://nettuts.com/working-with-cmss/how-to-create-a-wordpress-theme-from-scratch-part-2/ Earlier we posted a link to creating a WordPress theme from scratch. Here is the next part in that great tutorial. Easier Theme Development with Sample WordPress Content – http://wpcandy.com/articles/easier-theme-development-with-the-sample-post-collection.html Want to thoroughly test your theme for every situation? This post details how [...]

Simple Breadcrumb Navigation

Using a plugin is the most common way to create breadcrumb navigation. The most popular plugin is Breadcrumb NavXT Though this is a functional plugin, it is not the best (too many database queries as well as having to include a plugin with your theme is rather clunky). This article: http://www.kriesi.at/archives/wordpress-tutorial-simple-breadcrumb-navigation Details how to do [...]

Integrating Twitter Into Your WordPress Blog

Twitter is the new cool thing. You can waste hours on it, or you can use it productively. Personally I like to use it as another way for clients to keep their site updated and fresh. This will help their customers see that there is a real person behind the company. But for it to [...]

Beyond blogging

As advocates of using WordPress for more than a blog publishing platform, we make a vigilant effort to find ways to push past some perceived limitiations of WordPress. There is a gem of a post over at Web Designer Wall that discusses WordPress theme hacks. While the post is a little older, there’s many items [...]

Navigation Tips: Suckerfish, Sliding Doors, and Breadcrumbs

Sliding Doors Navigation with WordPress – http://hackwordpress.com/sliding-doors-wordpress-navigation-css-technique/ WordPress by default cannot support the infamous sliding doors technique, but with this simple change, you can create beautiful navigation to your hearts content. Sliding Doors + Sons of Suckerfish – http://www.jappler.com/blog/archive/2007/11/12/sliding-doors-sons-of-suckerfish-jappler-menus Last week we talked about Sons of Suckerfish and how to use them in a WordPress [...]

Static Homepage Navigation

This is a great little bit of code. What it does is create static home page link in your navigation that you could place before your wp_list_pages code, to have an active state on your home page link. This way you can use css to style the “current_page_item” class like for any other page. Here’s [...]

Suckerfish Drop Down Menus with WordPress

Today we are going to answer a common question regarding WordPress navigation. How to create simple drop down menus that work across browsers. If you are at all familiar with the web standards approach, then you have probably heard of Suckerfish Drop Downs. http://htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns/ Integrating this is mostly CSS, but here is the WordPress code [...]

Archives, Comments, Jabs, and Theme Design

Beautiful Website Archives – http://www.sitepoint.com/article/beautiful-web-site-archives/ A great article by Apple designer and CSS guru Jina Bolton on some innovative and great archive pages. Too often WordPress theme designers don’t pay attention to the details of the theme like archives, so this should serve as some inspiration to rethink your archives pages. Leaving it to default [...]