Archive for October 19, 2008

Why choose PHP?

{ October 19, 2008 @ 4:00 pm } · { HTML, James Black, PHP, RSS, Web 2.0 }
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There are some compelling reasons to work with PHP. For many projects, you will find that the production process is significantly faster than you might expect if you are used to working with other scripting languages. PHP is used in-order to see results quickly without sacrificing stability. As an open-source product, PHP is well supported by a committed user community and can be run on all the major operating systems and with most servers.

AS PHP allows you to separate HMTL code from scripted elements, you will notice a significant decrease in development time on most projects – an area that drew my attention when researching PHP and its performance. I run on an Apple Macbook at home and was unsure of whether it was possible to run PHP on Leopard. However, I since discovered that it is designed to run on many operating systems and to cooperate with many servers and databases. (It runs on the Windows operating system, Linux and Macintosh OS X). Support is also provided for a range of web servers such as Apache, Microsoft Internet Information Server, Website Pro and more. This is an area I shall discuss further in my developed proposal, as I can draw upon how I can test a project with personal web server and install it on my Macbook accordingly.

Talking to WP Theme Developer Justin Tadlock

{ October 19, 2008 @ 9:18 am } · { Kasper Sorensen, Personal, web design, Wordpress }
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As I said in one of my first posts, I really wanted to get in touch with Justin before getting too much into WP Themes. I have used some of Justin’s articles and tutorials before, especially his series on using custom fields are very useful for learning about the power of this feature. He kindly answered some of my questions and provided some really helpful links for further exploration.

What is the main advice you would give to someone who is creating their first Theme?

My main advice about creating your first theme is to just get the basics down. Learn from the Default WP theme. It’s a good example of a very basic theme. Don’t try to get too fancy with all kinds of neat features.
Know the Codex. That’s the single best thing you could do:
If nothing else, you should know how to find things quickly there.

If you’re looking to do this more long term and would like to build up a presence within the community, then you need to have a support system set up. Also, make sure you put your theme on WeblogToolsCollection.com.

Are there any “Rules” you have to follow?

The only rules you should try to strictly follow are these (especially the Plugin API stuff)

How do you publish your themes? Purely on your own site or do you make them available on WordPress.org as well.

I’ve never put any themes on WP.org because some of mine are too complex for the basic demo they have set up. Magazine-type themes definitely won’t look good there because, most of the time, options must be set before using the theme. I do plan on adding my next theme there though.

What are your thoughts on Premium Themes vs. Free Themes?

Premium vs Free? Mostly, I think you should do whatever you want, but I don’t like to see users getting ripped off because they bought a crappy theme. More thoughts on this:

http://justintadlock.com/archives/2008/05/29/screw-the-premium-theme-market

http://themeshaper.com/blog/the-ethics-of-premium-wordpress-themes/#comment-5101

Anything you want to add?

I also had a forum member ask about learning to develop with WP. I have a pretty lengthy answer with lots of links that you should bookmark.

If anyone is more interested in the stuff Justin does, then follow his tweets and his bookmarks and make sure you add his blog’s RSS feed to your reader.

/Kasper – on Twitter and Delicious

Understanding Widgets – My Next Step

{ October 19, 2008 @ 8:31 am } · { Kasper Sorensen, PHP, Web 2.0, web design, Wordpress }
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I have never really thought of what widgets where, even though I have used them on many occasions. I have used WordPress to create many websites, and customized themes in all kinds of areas. Normally though, I just create my own template files within the WordPress theme folder and just hard code all the “widgets” like categories and blogroll into the template files. Unfortunately it’s not that easy when you are dealing with a complete WordPress Theme.

If you want to make a theme popular there are a few things you have to keep in mind. WPDesigner has a nice list of stuff that can help make a theme more popular. Number three on the list is:

Is it generic? Your free theme will not be used by one client. It’ll be used by thousands of clients. It’s very important to keep all features generic. Stay away from hard-coding anything and stay away from too many non-customizable graphics.

Generic is probably the single most restraining word when designing themes, they have to be fluid and able to accept the most ridiculous content. You never know if someone wants to call their blog: http://llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.co.uk (Yes that is actually a working URL, and a village in North Wales). Returning to Widgets, you have no control over what widgets are going to be used with your theme, there a many widgets available to choose from, but the most common are: categories, archives, blogrolls etc. To quote one more of the important popular theme steps:

Is it widget-ready? The widget plugin now comes with WordPress so this is an obvious one. There’s no more reasons to not widgetize your theme.

Automattic has some great info about making your theme widget ready which will come in useful. Making a theme ready for widgets is all about wrapping code in CSS classes and id’s and then have some kind of uniform styling for them. What I’m most concerned about is that widgets can contain so many elements from text to images, and that might make the horizontal division hard. It will at least be hard to make it look good.

/Kasper – on Twitter and Delicious

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