Category Archives: Themes

VoodooPress Facelift Begins

I’ve been a bit torn lately. When VoodooPress launched, WordPress was using the Twenty Ten theme. We made it the goal to always be using the newest WordPress theme. When WordPress launched with Twenty Eleven, we switched over. But this time, Twenty Twelve came out mid-cycle – it didn’t release with a WordPress version. Well, I finally decided to pull the trigger! What we have right now is bare bones Twenty Twelve. I’m about to make a child theme, and will spend the next few weeks slowly customizing the theme. I’ll post anything I figure out as we move along. I definitely plan to make the theme wider, style the widgets, tweak the header, and maybe even get my footer widgets back. Time to play!

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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I Want True Full Width! A Wide Responsive Theme!

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So here’s something that I think is totally lacking in WordPress theme that are available. Quality, WIDE themes! Apparently full-width template doesn’t mean to others what it does to me. I’ve been testing a variety of theme on my blog, and I have found a lot of quality stuff to be certain. I plan to keep switching things up now that I’ve made it so easy on myself with my plugin. I literally have every customization I want in there, I just have to install a new theme, figure out what templates do what, make a child theme, and drop in a few custom template tags and I’m good. Less than half an hour of work… BUT, here is what I want!!

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Set Your Featured Image Automagically From the First Image in the Post

Development Tip: How to Know What Template is Being Used

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I’ve been working on an overhaul of my personal blog for a while now. My old theme was pretty bloated, and way more than I needed since I offloaded everything away. The site used to have everything on it, but I moved all my WordPress posts to VoodooPress, and all my Voodoo Empire specific stuff to its own site. My blog doesn’t need all the features it had, and it was slowing things down. I haven’t had time to finish my custom theme, so in the meantime I decided to play around with some available themes, starting with Fanwood from DevPress. I have all of my custom stuff that used to be in the theme living in its own functionality plugin now. So I can activate any new theme, and within 20 minutes, have all my custom stuff in place. But the one problem I ran into – FanWood is a complex theme, not always using the standard WordPress templates I would expect – single.php for instance. Well, what’s an easy way to know what template is being loaded at all times? I’ve got the answer for ya!

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How I Built My Nifty Login Box at the Top of VoodooPress

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When you visit the site, you can see our nifty login/out and register box at the top of the page. Go ahead, take a peak! See it there? Cool! I wanted to add that into my theme, make it easy to move from site to site, and between themes. Let’s take a peak and see how that’s done!

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Twenty Twelve Theme Will no Longer Ship With WordPress 3.4

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It wasn’t that long ago that I made a post about my excitement to be getting a new theme, twentytwelve (2012) which would be shipping with WordPress 3.4. You see, I always run the latest and greatest default WordPress theme here on VoodooPress, tweaked through a child theme of course – to fit my needs. But according to this discussion over on the WordPress Development Blog, time is running out on the development cycle for WP 3.4, and the 2012 theme isn’tt yet ready for primetime. Too bad, I was looking forward to a VoodooPress overhaul, and a new series of posts about the things we could do with this new theme! BUt no matter, WP 3.4 will still bring a host of cool upgrades to our favourite CMS, and we’ll get 2012 soon enough to have fun with!

CSS3 Lightbox Effect For Your Featured Images

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I keep mentioning that I’m slowly working on a custom theme for my personal blog. I work in fits and starts whenever something inspires me. Well today that inspiration struck! I saw this post from c.bavota of bavotasan.com and I really wanted to work this out. One of my main goals for my new theme is to keep things lightweight, and use css whenever possible. This gave me my opportunity! First you’ll need to check out the link above to see how the idea works. Then we adapt:

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