Category Archives: Customizing Themes

Building a ‘Responsive’ Adsense Widget for the Twenty Twelve Theme

NOTE: My adsense account has been deactivated. And the fine folks at Google simply don’t bother explaining why they deactivate accounts – they just do it. If I ever find out why I will forward that info on. For now, I would recommend you do not use the guide I have below – in case that is the problem.

Over the past two days, I’ve put up a couple articles relating to widgetizing the twenty twelve header and guidance for adding multiple items up there while accounting for 2012′s responsive nature. I wanted to finish up today by showing my solution for running Google Adsense ads to the header while still maintaining the responsive nature of the theme as best we can, let’s dig in!

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Adding a Login Function to Our Twenty Twelve Header Widget Area – And Responsiveness Considerations

Add a Header Widget Area to the WordPress Twenty Twelve Theme

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WordPress 3.5 is going to drop very soon. And with it comes the new Twenty Twelve theme as default. We’ve already started tweaking it on VoodooPress. So next up on our agenda was finding a little spot to put advertising. A widget area up top seemed like just the solution, so here is how we got that done!

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Hmmm… Where to Advertise on 2012 Theme?

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I’m trying to work through how I want to position advertising on the 2012 theme. I just don’t like it in the sidebar much. I’m considering getting rid of the current login/out/register float I have up top. I think a bar along the top of the screen, inside the wrapper, not stuck to the top might work. Like right above the nav menu… maybe style it up like my widget areas, float login stuff left and the ad to the right. What do you think? Not the advertising in general, but if you were trying to position ‘something’ on this theme that you wanted to be visible/useful, where would you put it? Do you think any areas lend themselves better to user interaction than others?

Reader Request – Styling Sidebar Content or Widget Areas in the Twenty Twelve Theme

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A reader dropped me a comment yesterday wondering how we style the widget areas here on VoodooPress. I’m always happy to answer questions whenever I can, so we will take a look at what I do here, give a little bit of code, and even touch on other things you could do to spruce up your widget area. Let’s dive right in!

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Modify the Width of the New WordPress Twenty Twelve Theme

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We just recently switched over to the new Twenty Twelve theme on VoodooPress, and it’s quite a nice theme! But one thing I saw immediately, it’s too narrow! I have been on a kick lately of trying to get all my sites to have nice, lightweight, clean themes. Twenty Twelve fits the bill. But it seems that everyone wants really narrow websites. A lot of folks have bigger monitors, I want to use some of that real estate. I’m not going to cover anything drastic here, but you can go as big or as small as you want with some careful planning. Note that, even though I’m showing how to make the theme wider, this will also work to make the theme narrower. Let’s dig in!

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How to Replace $args in twentytwelve_custom_header_setup Using custom-header?

I’ve been Googlin my butt off… now that I’ve made the Twenty Twelve theme 1100px wide, I’d love to adjust the width of the header image. I’m just not sure how to override the args of the parent theme from a child theme…. just the width really, any ideas?

Make an Interesting and Useful Archive or Explore Page for Your WordPress Site

Google Fonts, Child Themes, and @import

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I’ve been trying to work through some issues after getting a comment on one of my fonts articles. It seems some people have been experiencing some problems getting Google Fonts to work on their child theme. So I was messing around with mine, and I experienced the same unpredictability. After messing around with things, I got mine straightened out, maybe this will help you!

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Customize Your Excerpt Length Per Template

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I’ve seen a variety of posts from people devising different ways to customize the_excerpt length. In WordPress, most people are familiar with 2 ways to display their content: the_content, and the_excerpt. Both give fairly predictable results as to what you get. the_content gives you all of your content, with formatting intact. the_excerpt gives you your set excerpt, stripping away formatting, links, etc. But you had one excerpt length, and that was it! What if you want various excerpts? Well I’ve seen ways to craft various excerpts by creating different functions that had to be called per template, but as of WP 3.3 that is no more! Check it out!

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