Back in August, I ran a little article about running queries from functions.php. We did a little pre_get_posts work, and a bit of a conditional stuff. Well, I learned a bit more since then, and you need one more essential piece of information! Let me key you in on that!
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!
So over the past couple of days, we got a basic child theme setup. We started with basic width and header images. Then we moved on to margins, and relocating some stuff in the header, and customizing widgets a bit. Let’s just look at our final code.
Google recently let their +1 button loose upon the masses. I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to implement it here on VoodooPress. We already have everything in place that we need. If you followed along with this tutorial you are already all set up too! If not, check it out. You don’t need to do exactly what we did there, just follow along with the concept. We’re just going to insert the +1 button into the code to display it at the bottom of our posts.
I’ve never made a plugin before. I really never thought I had a need. But recently I changed my way of thinking. So I decided to learn how to make a plugin to display my followers, fans and subscribers in a widget. Now this widget is about as basic as possible. But it’s a starting point. I learned something, and maybe you can too! Let’s take a look at the why and how.
So far in this little mini-series, we have learned how to add in new post formats to our twenty ten child theme. We have set up meta boxes to enter in a URL for our Link post format. We have split out our formats to individual templates, and we set up our new link format in it’s own template, and made use of the URL to link the title of the link post format to the original article. But what if someone visits our site and comes directly to the single post view of the link post? Our edits so far have only affected the index/blog view (and archives). Well today we will get that link added in to the single post view. Check it out!
If you are like me, you probably spend a decent amount of time writing your posts. Trying to make sure everything is accurate, proofreading, etc. It’s great to get that information out there as many ways as possible. Using RSS is a great tool for getting your message across. However by default, WordPress does not include images in the RSS feed. You may use the featured image option, or you may attach images in your post. I know I spend a fair bit of time selecting or crafting an image for my post. I would really like for that to come across in my RSS feed. Let’s take a look at ways to include your images in your feed.
I think a nice feature to have in a theme is a list of related posts on the single post view. It gives the reader another way to find your content. We are going to use the same method we used before for adding content under a post. This way you can just add this into your functions.php, once again keeping things simple so we don’t have to modify any parent theme templates.
If you followed along yesterday, we set up a new thumbail size to be used in our admin panel. I find this a handy feature because I like to be able to see things. It helps jog my memory on each post. Besides that, it’s just plain cool. Let’s take a look how to add our new image size into the admin panel posts list.
EDIT: I recently found out a better way to add post formats to a Twenty-Ten child theme, scroll to the bottom of the post to check it out!
As we announced yesterday, WordPress 3.1 was released. Hopefully you have all upgraded by now. If not, get to it. Remember to always keep your install up to date with the latest release. Not just for the cool new features, but for security too. Anyway, if you recently upgraded to 3.1, you may be asking yourself the same question as I see others asking. Where are my post formats? WordPress 3.1 promised lots of different post formats, where are they? Let’s answer that question and tell you how to get them going if you don’t have them.
