Building Your First Widget

I spoke today at WordCamp Chicago, talking about building widgets. In my session we learned how to build your first WordPress widget and went step-by-step through the best practices for building a simple widget. We discussed when a widget should be built into a theme or plugin, and when a widget should be its own plugin. You can check out the slides if you’d like to.

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WordCamp Milwaukee session slides and links

Here is some info to go with my WordCamp Milwaukee talk on Theme Choices, When To Have A Baby.

In this presentation I talked about developing with different types of themes including parent themes, child themes, theme frameworks, and starter themes. Some of the specific themes I talked about were TwentyEleven, Thematic, Hybrid, Genesis, and Underscores.

I also talked about splitting up design and functionality, and when to use a functionality plugin. View the presentation slides to learn more.

Creating your own Page Templates

On many WordPress powered sites, the primary focus is static pages rather than blog posts. I have built some sites that only use pages and don’t even have a blog. For these types of sites that are using WordPress “as a CMS” rather than a blogging platform, the theme file that generates the pages becomes that much more important.

Using this same page template file on each page could make a site very homogeneous and be a headache to customize. But it is easy to create your own page templates and apply them to specific pages on a site. Read More

Add a theme’s CSS style to the visual editor

One of my favorite features in WordPress 3.0 is the ability to add an editor style to themes which is loaded in the visual editor of WordPress.

Without an editor style, content in the visual editor has minimal styling and generally does not match how the content looks when it is published on the site. By adding an editor style to a WordPress theme, you can get the content you are managing in the backend to visually match the content on the frontend, creating a more WYSIWYG experience for the end user.

Adding this feature to a new or existing WordPress theme is very simple. For this tutorial, I’ll use iNove, a popular theme from the theme directory that I’m using for a current project and need to update. Read More