GrandSlambert

Archive for the ‘Wordpress’ Category

Today I finally got around to uploading my first custom theme, the City of Minneapolis. This one features a nice view of the downtown skyline and allows you to modify some settings in the header and footer, including hiding my author credit without editing any theme files. Please see the official theme page for more information about this theme.

This theme is the first in what I hope to be many designed around a specific city. The colors in this theme were chosen to blend well with the photo in the header and not based on any official colors of the city. If you are interested in a theme for your favorite city, please feel free to contact me and I will see if I can build a theme around it for you.

It’s been a long time coming, but today we saw the release of the latest version of Wordpress, and so far I am impressed. This particular site is now using this latest version and aside form a couple of bugs I found it seems to work well. Hopefully the bugs can be worked out and a maintenance release will be available, but I want to focus on the new features with this post.

Theme Installer

For quite a while now Wordpress has had a wonderful tool for finding and installing plugins in Wordpress, but themes was a different story. Though the Wordpress.org web site listed hundreds of great themes, the only way to get them to work for your site was to download a zip file then upload the files to your web server. If you didn’t know how to use FTP or open a zip file, you could really be lost with this. I have seen quite a few sites running Wordpress that are using the classic them included with the Wordpress software.

This changes with Wordpress 2.8 with the addition of the “Add New Themes” tool that is built into the software. When you click on the option, you get a screen similar to the one on the right (click to enlarge) where you can search for themes with specific keywords, or select from a variety of options (tags) to find a theme. With the hundreds of themes already available you are certain to find one you can use.

When you search for a keyword, or by tag, or use either the “Featured” or “Newest” options on the “Add New Themes” page you will be presented with a list of themes to choose from. You can preview the themes before you install them, but be warned that the preview will have the sample data similar to what you see on the Wordpress.org web site. To see how it will look with your data, you will need to install the theme first. Don’t worry, just installing won’t change your site, you still need to activate it.

Once you find one you want to try, click on the install link to install the theme. The pop up window that shows up is a bit confusing at first as you have to scroll the window down to find the button to install the theme. Once you do this the system will download and install the theme for you, then you can preview it with your content or activate the theme on your site. If you don’t like the look of the theme once it’s installed, you can easily delete the theme from the Appearance page.

This feature will really make it easier for people to apply different themes to their site. The fine people at Wordpress even included a link to upload themes on this new section so that theme developers can easily share their themes from inside their own site.

There are quite a few other great new features that I want to talk about, but we’ll wait for tomorrow to post those. Let me get a chance to check them out before I tell you all about them. If you want more information on all the wonderful new features of Wordpress 2.8, you can check the official announcement or the codex page.

When you work in web development for over 20 years like I have, everyone you know asks you questions about their web site. Recently I have had quite a few people ask me if they can use Wordpress to build a web site for their business, even if they do not want to have a blog. Although the Wordpress software is primarily used to build blogs, it has a wonderful feature that make it perfect for static type web sites as well.

The feature we will be working with is available after you have created at least one page in your Wordpress site. Wordpress has the ability to create both posts and pages, and you will create a page by clicking on the “Add New” link under the “Pages” sub menu. By default, Wordpress creates a generic “about” page so you will likely already have one created, however, for this to work you need to create a page that will contain the content of your home page. It’s probably best to call this page “Home”, but you may prefer to name it differently. You can put some basic content there for now and change it after things are set up, but make sure you publish this page so it can be displayed.

Now that you have the page created, you will need to tell Wordpress to use this new page for your “home” page. This is done on the Reading Settings page. You can access this page within your site administration area by opening the Settings sub-menu and click the “Reading” option. A page similar to the screen capture to the right (click to enlarge) will appear. The option you will change is the “Front Page Displays” option. First, click the “A static page (select below)” option, then use the drop down next to “Front Page” to select the page you want to be your home page. Save this setting and your site will now display the selected page for your home page.

Now I know you are going to ask me about the other option on that screen. If you have no intention of writing a blog, just don’t select anything there, it can be left as is. However, if you plan to have a static home page but also a blog page, you can use this option to select which page will show your blog posts. You will need to have created a page in Wordpress for this purpose. You do not have to write any content on the page you create since Wordpress will replace it with your blog posts. Create an empty page with whatever name, probably “Blog”, and publish it, then return to the Reading Settings page and select that page for the blog posts.

As you can see, though Wordpress wasn’t specifically designed for it, a person could use WordPress for a static type web site. In fact, I have done it several times. Here are some examples:

• Whole Food Nation
• 77 Ingredients
• Interest Blogs