I gave this talk at WordCamp Norway 2013. It covers several tips and tricks that will make you a better theme developer.
You can follow the slides and the notes/transcript below. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to ping me here or on Twitter, I’m always happy to help :)
I released a WordPress theme called Publish earlier this month, and today, thanks to the awesome Theme Team of Automattic, Publish has been made available to all WordPress.com users.
Publish is a clean and minimal WordPress theme, perfect for (but not limited to) single-author blogs. While working on shipping Publish to WordPress.com customers, a bunch of improvements have been made to the theme itself, like support for uploading a custom logo (vs using Gravatar), better compatibility with many sidebar widgets and more.
WordPress.com has three gorgeous new themes: Watson, Simfo, and Publish: wp.me/pf2B5-3qV /cc @kovshenin @thethemefoundry :)
— WordPress.com (@wordpressdotcom) November 30, 2012
I’m excited to see how Publish does on WordPress.com, and looking forward to launching more themes. You can start a new blog on WordPress.com with Publish or head over to WordPress.org for the downloadable version. Enjoy!
I’m pleased to announce that Publish is now available for download in the WordPress.org themes directory. Publish is a theme I’ve been working on for quite a while, started back last year and then released to GitHub in February this year. When I started contributing to _s, I did a complete revamp of the theme, but kept the main intent – a minimal blogging theme with focus on the content.
Publish is ideal for single-author blogs, but supports multi-author blogs too. To change the “logo” Gravatar, you’ll need to change the main administrator e-mail address via Settings – General. Publish supports navigation menus, has a sidebar for your widgets, implements threaded comments, has support for various post formats and the sticky post. It has also got a responsive layout, with a drop-down menu for mobile devices. Other features, including post thumbnails, are on their way, so hang in there, or submit a patch!
Give it a spin and let me know what you think. Since theme reviews are live on WordPress.org, I’d really appreciate one, whether good or bad. If you would like to contribute to Publish, feel free to open pull requests or issues on GitHub.
We’ve all been waiting for the new default theme for WordPress, and it has finally arrived. Without a doubt, Twenty Twelve is one of the best themes I’ve ever played with. It’s so simple, clean, good-looking and filled with so much awesomeness inside.
I’m sure that by now you have downloaded the theme, or at least checked out the demo. In this short review I’d like to point out the things that make Twenty Twelve so awesome, and what you can learn from it. If you find other gems worth mentioning, don’t forget to share them by posting a comment.
I think that although related to appearance, favicon support should not be part of a WordPress theme. You’ll probably want to take your favicon with you, no matter which theme you use. Conclusion: favicons are plugin territory.
Agree? Disagree? Why?
In this session, Ryan Imel of WPCandy talks briefly about how WordPress themes have changed over the past several years, including free themes, premium themes, default themes, theme frameworks and of course, theme options!
As you might know I’m obsessed with theme options, and I even started a blog about them, which was supposed to showcase both great and “not so great” theme options panels. I had quite a hard time finding great theme options pages, as opposed to ones I didn’t like, so as Ryan mentioned in his talk, people often refer to that blog as the “Theme Options Porn” blog.
However, I have a feeling that the Theme Customizer introduced in WordPress 3.4, might totally change things, and render my blog useless (which I don’t mind!) I’m stumbling across more and more themes that “squeeze” their options into the customizer, which is great. And there’s a great tutorial by Otto showing you how to do that. Thanks Otto!
Obviously most of the themes are still doing both, Theme Options and Customizer Options, but I don’t think that’ll last for long and here’s why. There’s never been an easier API to create powerful, core-like and future-proof controls, such as color pickers, image uploaders, ond others. Once you figure it out, you’ll see that it’s easier (and much less code) to write options for the Customizer, and you’ll never want to go back.
I must admit I’m scared of a theme like Weaver, putting all of its options into the Customizer, but then again, the Customizer has already got most of the controls you’d ever use for theme options, as well as options sectioning out of the box! It’ll be much more difficult to create a non-WordPress (or what Ryan calls the “Russian Doll Syndrome”) experience. Having said that, one might think that the Customizer is restricting WordPress theme developers, by setting rules to what you can do, and what you can’t do, as well as a pre-defined user interface, which you can’t really change (not supposed to at least).
I’d say that the Customizer is not only guiding theme developers to create better, usable theme settings, but also empowering them to do so. Besides, you can always extend a Customizer control and customize the hell out of it, though you probably shouldn’t :)
Anyway, that’s just my thinking about the state future of WordPress themes. Let’s hope Ryan gives a similar talk next year, and see how things change. What do you think about theme options pages? What do you think will change over the next year? Do you see huge potential in the Theme Customizer like I do? Please, share your thoughts by posting a comment. Thanks!
I don’t often work on designs. In fact, until today, this blog had only three different themes. The first one was a blue-ish theme from the .org repo, the second one was made by me (my worst first ever WordPress theme), and had an opening <? php tag on the top left. The third one was one I temporarily called Publish, which you see in the screenshot on the left.
Today’s “redesign” is not much different from Publish, in fact, I just called it Publish 1.1, changed fonts, colors, and moved elements around, so it’s not really a redesign, but more of a quick refresh. However, because I started contributing to Automattic’s _s starter theme, I thought I absolutely had to use it in a real-life project. And what could be more real than this? ;)
I used the theme generator to create the base for my new-old theme, used the sidebar-content demo layout and made the rest with CSS. It was a breeze and took me three hours or so. It’s far from perfect, and I’ll keep tuning it along the way. The Gravatar on the top left is a simple call to get_avatar using the admin e-mail address set in the Settings, not sure it’ll fit for multi-author blogs.
<?php echo get_avatar( get_option( 'admin_email' ), 100 ); ?>
Anyway, this is just a reminder that Underscores is so awesome! I’ll keep working on this and you can obviously follow along on Github. Feedback, bug reports and pull requests much appreciated! Have a great Wednesday :)
Update: and it’s now compatible with (some) mobile devices too. The “small-menu” script in the underscores theme is doing a really good job.