Tammy Hart Designs

Food Blog Design Featured on the Front Page of Slideshare

Tammy Hart — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:58:44 +0000

So I got a tweet from my friend Wade this morning that surprised me:

@tammyhart Your "Food Blog Design" deck is on the front page of SlideShare: http://t.co/8dmlYSDi

49 minutes ago via TweetDeck ReplyRetweetFavorite

Wade Kwon

I’ve been posting to slideshare for a couple of years now and one of my decks has 3,500 views.. from 2 years ago. But 1k+ in two days and rising now that I’m on the homepage, that’s pretty exciting.

I wish I knew more about how they select decks for their featured section. Is it because of views I was getting on my own? Favorites? Tthe popularity of the conference? The tags I used? I don’t know. If you know, please share in the comments.

At any rate, I’m pretty excited especially as it promotes Food Blog South. This was an amazing conference with so many talented people running it, speaking at it, and sponsoring it.

Here’s the deck:

Food Blog Design

Tammy Hart — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:35:41 +0000

Did you know that you can optimize your recipes so that they are listed with a thumbnail, rating, and other info in Google search results? Have you ever wondered why other food blogs with the same amount of traffic as yours get more comments and interaction? Do you just need a few pointers on how you can spiff up the look and feel of your food blog?

If you answered yes to any of these or have pondered similar questions you should be sure to attend my session on Food Blog Design at FoodBlog South this coming Saturday. I’ll be speaking at 10:30 for 80 minutes on this topic and one lucky attendee is even getting a design makeover for their blog!

The entire conference is going to be delicious and you’re sure to leave enriched with new knowledge and ideas as well as full from all the wonderful food! There are still a few tickets left, so if you haven’t registered yet, be sure to do it soon!

Enqueues, Includes & Defines! Oh my! The Foundations of Plugin & Theme Development

Tammy Hart — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 19:57:05 +0000

WordCamp Birmingham 2012 is underway and I had the pleasure of delivering my presentation this morning at 9am. It was a sleepy crowd with the smell of coffee filling the air, but it was a good start to what has been a great day so far.

I’d like to give a big thanks to those that attended my session today and I hope that you were able to glean something from it. It’s my goal to help those that are interested in developing for WordPress to learn the right ways to handle things like enqueues and activation hooks from the beginning, instead of backwards after you’ve already hacked around a different (read “wrong”) way. I hate it when I learn backwards and have to say things like, “Oh crud, why didn’t I know this already?” So hopefully my talk today will help you avoid such an experience.

If you weren’t able to attend today, or if you want a refresher, here are my slides:

Reusable Custom Meta Boxes Part 3: Extra Fields

Tammy Hart — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 20:06:28 +0000

In Part 1 and Part 2 of our custom meta box template tutorial series, we learned how to create a field array to loop through and create a custom meta box with your standard fields. Now let’s throw in a bit of JavaScript for some fancy, but highly useful fields.

Finish Reading at WPTuts+

2011 is Going Out with a Bang… Literally

Tammy Hart — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 19:52:55 +0000

2011 is going out with a bang. Literally, Chris just hit a deer in our only working vehicle. Yippee.

December 30, 2011 11:27 pm via TweetDeck ReplyRetweetFavorite

@tammyhart

Tammy Hart

2011 has been a rough year for me, my family, our business, and others that are involved in our family and business. I am beyond ready to wash my hands of it and get 2012 kicked off on a positive note.

“Not so fast”, said the 4 point buck my husband hit in our only running vehicle last night. That’s right, the car we just sunk $400 into getting the front left wheel bearing fixed in the week before Christmas (not quite the gifts my husband and I had wanted to exchange), now has a smashed grill and headlights. We do have insurance and they are going to help us take care of it, but in the meantime we not only have to come up with the $500 deductible, we have to figure out how we’re going to get around. We only need $200 to fix our other vehicle, or at least get it running.

A friend of mine wanted to pitch in, so he asked me to set up a donation can where he and possibly others could drop some coinage. At least 2011 won’t let me forget that we have friends that love us and that God always has a way of carrying you through.

Reusable Custom Meta Boxes Part 2: Advanced Fields

Tammy Hart — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 19:58:44 +0000

In Part 1 of our custom meta box template tutorial series, we covered how to set up a custom meta box that loops through an array of fields and outputs each one with the necessary html for various types of form fields. Now we’re ready to start adding a few advanced items to the array and switch case.

Finish Reading at WPtuts+

Now Featured on WP.TutsPlus.com

Tammy Hart — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 18:40:53 +0000

I am excited to announce today that I have started writing tutorials for WP.TutsPlus.com, the latest member of Envato’s tutorials family. I have long been a fan of anything Envato produces and now I can actually say I’m a part of that.

You can follow my feed here: Tammy Hart on WPtuts+, and I’ll also post snippets with links to my articles on my blog as well.

Reusable Custom Meta Boxes Part 1: Intro and Basic Fields

Tammy Hart — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 18:13:31 +0000

There are a lot of tutorials on creating custom meta boxes, even just here on Wptuts, and it goes to show that having a good knowledge of these and a system for creating them is crucial to a successful WordPress theme or plugin project. In this series we won’t rehash what meta boxes are but instead we’ll create an easy system for plugging them into whatever your latest project is to keep your work moving consistently.

Finish Reading at WPtuts+

Taking Advantage of the Template Hierarchy

Tammy Hart — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 16:12:49 +0000

As someone who does mostly custom work for clients and for my own projects, I am always thrilled at the constant improvements that are made to the WordPress template hierarchy. I can remember back to a time when having a page load first instead of your latest posts was a moderate hack instead of a simple setting. Then there was the template hack of getting a custom layout on your homepage. It’s not really much of a hack but I consider it a rusty idea now that we have much better methods.

Custom Home Page Template

There are several ways to change your homepage template now:

Create a page template and selecting it from the “Page Template” dropdown in the page attributes bar as pictured to the right.
Create a page template that is named with the ID of the page. So if your Home page has an ID of 2, you would name the template “page-2.php”.
Create a page template that is named with the slug of the page, or “page-home.php”.
The last and best way is to simply name the template “front-page.php” since this is the page you are setting as your “front page”.

Template Conventions

The hierarchy rules for everything else follow pretty much the same rules. If you haven’t taken the time to study the Template Hierarchy chart in the Codex, then I’d say you’re not really serious about building themes. It’s absolutely required reading.

Category Templates

One more area that I want to especially take time to point out is how category templates are handled. A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post on how to create a page template that paginates posts from a certain category. It has been one of the most popular posts on my blog and also one of the hardest pieces of code to get to work in everyone’s particular situation as you can tell by the multitude of support requests in the comments. In fact, it’s the very reason I’m writing this post.

My original intention was to show how I had hijacked a category called “portfolio” in order to add blog posts to my site that ere filtered from the main feed areas and lived in their own portfolio section on the site. Since then, I have moved my portfolio items into a much better application by creating a custom post type for them, but I digress.

My official recommendation for customizing a page of category posts is to simply customize that category’s template. Just like the home page templates, you have multiple options:

Create a category template that is named with the ID.. So if your Tutorials category has an ID of 2, you would name the template “category-2.php”.
Create a category template that is named with the slug, or “category-tutorials.php”.

Doing this will save you a ton of headaches since you won’t have to worry about creating a custom post query, or pagination rules.

So Many Projects, So Little Time

Tammy Hart — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 23:31:45 +0000

I wanted to give a quick update on what has been happening with me lately. I could write about 5 “dear diary” type entries on some of the drama, but that’s not necessary.

The biggest thing is that my business partner and I have left Clever Rocket to start a new venture with a local web design firm. We both felt suffocated and limited in the struggling startup and we’re really excited to be able to love our work again and have the support of friends and experienced web businessmen. I can’t say any more about the new venture yet, but suffice it to say that I’m providing the same great service, Web Design and WordPress Development, but with the help and support of experienced web businessmen.

Some even more exciting news is that I have officially released my first plugin in the WordPress Plugin Repository. It’s called “ReciPress” and allows you to add a recipe to your blog posts. It’s just in the fledgling stage right now, but I have big plans for it including a “pro” version with additional features and upgraded support.

I’m also working on a Tutorial series about creating custom meta boxes that will help developers build a library you can use over and over again in themes and plugins for creating meta boxes with all different types of fields. This series will be published at Envato’s WordPress tutorial site, wp.tutsplus.com.

I have even more ideas spinning around in my head that include things like new themes and plugins and I can’t wait to share them all. But like the title infers, these things take time and no matter how excited I am about them, I need to make sure I give each one the care and attention it deserves to make sure the final product is the best it can be.