WORDCAMP: WordPress Theming

Posted May 3rd, 2008 by verso
05/04/2008 - 10:00
05/04/2008 - 10:45

Part of WordCamp

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Notes from WordPress Theming session

Submitted by bobuva on Sun, 05/04/2008 - 17:50.

Presenter: Sarah Davies, ACLU Seattle

GreenBug theme (widget friendly)

Right-click on something to determine if it's an image (if View Background Image, then it's an image)

Gradient nav bar is 1-pixel-wide gradient and copied across page.

To embed Flash, you can't just put a flash tag in. WP will strip it out. You have to create a separate PHP file.

Plugins
Askimet, Google site maps, Wassup (realtime tracking of who/where on the site)

WebDeveloper Firefox plug-in.

FireBug debugger.

All In One SEO Pack: allows you to make only machine-readable tags. Most search engines ignore meta tags now. They pay attention to the title in your header.

Category Cloud Widget (size tags in a tag cloud)

WPCache - generates static html page each time you change something so the separate plug-in php files don't have to be reloaded each time the page is viewed.

Upgrade - zips everything up and makes updating much easier.

Google XML Site Maps (site map tells search engine how to index your site)

Google Analytics (she just puts it in the footer of the page; the plug-in may not work)

WP Super Cache (supposed to be faster than regular cache)
Some people are having problems with it.
One person reported that it blew up their entire site.

Some themes more stable than others (K2 has had some problems)

There is some fragility with some themes as far as making changes.

Sandbox theme is made to be customized, so it's stable.

Is there a way to search thru a theme to see if it has been upgraded? Some themes have depracated features.

Gravitar theme plug-in is broken, but it is rolled into the core now and it will work if you have WP 2.5.

Never use WYSIWYG - screws up line breaks & paragraphs.

Uncheck "Use the visual editor when writing."

BlogDesk: create posts and uploads to your blog. Not sure if it works with WP. This would be used in place of the standard web interfaces for writing to a blog.

Windows Live Writer: posts to WP, Blogger and other common.

Hosting

DreamHost: has 1-click install for WP. Has 30 themes you can just easily select from.

Unless you're doing something advanced, you don't need to know PHP.

Hosts that use Fantastico (?) have 1-click.

Even w/o 1-click, it's a simple 5-minute install.

Has anyone tried integrating BBPress? No.

Is there an export to PDF plug-in ? Don't know.

Post2pdf (but check compatibility with WP version)

Plug-in directory on wordpress.org is searchable.

Most plug-ins are GPL.

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