WPatch.com

A wealth of resources for Thematic theme framework for WordPress

Kevin — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 20:38:08 +0000

I’ve been digging into the WordPress theme framework Thematic, built by Ian Stewart and have found it a powerful foundation for WordPress theme development. I recently began using the theme I’ve been developing using Thematic and I thought it would help to point to a few of the most helpful resources that I’ve learned from.

ThemeShaper Forums — Once you start working with Thematic your first stop should likely be the ThemeShaper Forums.

One of the things I appreciate about the forums is that they are free and open with no restrictions or fees to pay to get the help you need as you learn to make Thematic do what you want.

10 design tips for your custom wordpress theme built with thematic at Cozmos Labs — in fact there’s a whole category of posts on Thematic at the Cozmos Labs site and I’ve found myself there often poking through those posts. There’s also a few free Thematic child themes available there.

Add “Featured Posts” to your Thematic child theme — popular in magazine style layouts, here’s a good tutorial on adding featured posts to your Thematic based theme.

Build WordPress Sites Fast With the Thematic Theme Framework — this post has a wealth of Thematic resources, like help with theme hooks, tutorials and links to lots of child themes.

Thematic Page Structure — This is a visual representation of most of the div elements, theme actions, hooks, and widget areas in Thematic. As you dig into the nuts and bolts of Thematic this will help save you time as you track down what goes where.

How To Modify WordPress Themes The Smart Way — this is a series of posts on themeshaper.com that covers, WordPress Child Theme Basics, Modular CSS in WordPress Child Themes, Using Filter Hooks in WordPress Child Themes and Using Action Hooks in WordPress Child Themes.

Useful Thematic Filters — this a a very helpful post with some handy Thematic filters such as: how to Replace the Blog Title with Your Logo; Add a Search Form to the Header; Add “Home” to Menu Options; Remove Blog Description; Remove the Post Footer; Add Google Analytics Tracking Code; Change the Footer Message; Add a Favicon; Removing Plug-In Code; and Removing and Renaming Widget Areas.

My sincere thanks to Ian Stewart and everyone who contributes to the Thematic framework making it such a powerful WordPress theming tool.

WordPress visual cheat sheet

Kevin — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:37:21 +0000

There’s a new and very handy WordPress Visual Cheat Sheet available for download at woorkup.com. One can never have too many WordPress cheat sheets.

Hot new WordPress theme – Mystique revisions

Kevin — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:36:58 +0000

Mystique is a powerful new theme that gives you so many reasons to love it. This is one of the most feature rich GPL theme’s I’ve seen in a while. Go take a look at the demo site to discover all the features, page layouts and included options. Nicely done.

Theme author | Download

Need proof WordPress works?

Kevin — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:18:50 +0000

Need proof WordPress works? Check out 30 Great Sites Using WordPress as a CMS.

WordPress tutorial videos

Kevin — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 21:47:40 +0000

Need help learning some of the basics or even more advanced features of WordPress?

Here are two resources for tutorial videos:

Customizing WordPress page and post titles

Kevin — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:48:18 +0000

I have previously written about customizing WordPress using a custom field function to change the title that displays at the top of a page allowing you to have, for instance, a link in the side bar to the home page called “Home” but a different title on that page such as “Welcome” instead of “Home”.

That was handy but took some modification of the theme template files. If you changed your theme you had to carry over those changes to the new theme to retain the custom page titles.

Now there’s a simple plugin that does all the work for you and adds the ability to customize the display titles of posts as well which I had not included in the original method and makes changing theme template files unnecessary.

The plugin is called WP-Title-2 and is one more tool in my WordPress as a CMS tool box.

For more plugins that help transform WordPress into a more powerful CMS platform you may be interested in my post: WordPress as a CMS and plugins that help.

Books on WordPress

Kevin — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 23:20:34 +0000

WordPress For Dummies

WordPress Theme Design

WordPress Complete: set up, customize, and market your blog

WordPress: Visual QuickStart Guide

A proper fix for PodPress in WordPress 2.6

Kevin — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:15:17 +0000

The powerful PodPress plugin for WordPress seems to have a problem with the new post revisions feature of WordPress 2.6. For many the solution has been to disable the post revision feature — but I happen to think that the post revision feature is a good thing.

Go here for a post by Andrew Ozz that explains how to fix the problem. Note that if you’re using PodPress version 8.8 you’ll find the fix in the comments section of that post.

PodPress in WordPress 2.6

WordPress 2.6 gallery shortcode

Kevin — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:25:50 +0000

One of the things that so nice about WordPress 2.6 is the ability to easily insert a mini photo gallery into your post. There’s also some handy gallery shortcode that give you options for the number of columns, the size of thumbnails and more.

WordPress 2.6 released

Kevin — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 11:31:54 +0000

WordPress 2.6 has been released with several worthwhile improvements. Check out the brief tour video.