Over the last few months at work we've been digging into the WordPress Theme Customizer and thinking about using it as the basis for a SaaS web app. Building upon the basic controls for the theme customizer is one of the challenges we've been facing and the Google Font Picker Control is the first of (at least two) the controls that we developed to make the Theme Customizer even more awesome.
Tag Archives: wordpress
Programming Resolutions for 2013
It's a new year and that means that it's time to look back on the last year and analyze what worked and what didn't. Setting resolutions to reinforce the good habits and to stop the bad habits is one of the best ways to keep growing as a developer. Continue Reading…
Why Removing the Links Manager from WordPress 3.5 is a Mistake
WordPress 3.5 is about to be officially released and there is a lot of awesome stuff coming out like the new Media Manager and the ability to easily add your favorite plugins to your site. There is truly a lot of brilliant stuff. But there is one issue with the new release that not many people seem to be commenting on.
Automattic, the company that manages WordPress, has chosen to remove the Links Manager, and this is totally fine; very few people use it and Automattic is moving the functionality into a plugin so that the few people who do want to use it can continue to do so. The problem is that to maintain backwards compatibility Automattic left the code in their system so that the Links Manager isn't actually removed it's just hidden. Continue Reading…
Removing the Tagline from the Theme Customizer in WordPress
I've finally started setting up the Theme Customizer in WordPress for my clients. I ran into an issue where the Theme Customizer has certain defaults that not all themes use. It is pretty rare for my sites to include a tagline; for us at BR the brand's tagline is usually included in the logo so we don't need to restate it. It would be very confusing if your theme customizer has an editable tagline that doesn't appear anywhere on the site.
Since this feature only came out this year there is still a lot of bad information running around; yes there is even some misinformation on WordPress Answers. Continue Reading…
Making Images Responsive in WordPress
I've been creating responsive WordPress themes pretty much since Ethan Marcotte wrote his Responsive Web Design article on A List Apart and I've been tinkering around with various ways to make images responsive in WordPress. I want to share my current method to accomplish it.
A WordPress Plugin Deployment Shell Script
Writing plugins for yourself or others is a natural step for a developer that uses WordPress. Unfortunately if you want to share your plugins with the WordPress community that means submitting them to the WordPress plugin repository and there is one really sucky part about that – learning Subversion.
Subversion, or SVN, was great years ago when Git didn't exist. But since the emergence of GitHub, Git has become hugely popular and produces far fewer headaches than SVN. As a result new developers don't even bother learning SVN. Why learn to drive a stick shift when you can drive an automatic that has better gas mileage and more control?
With a lot of googling and several hacking sessions I took an existing shell script and modified it so that is does all of the cumbersome SVN for you. It will pull down the latest version of your Git repo, reproduce it in SVN, and push the changes to the WordPress plugin repository. It will even move your plugin assets (including the header image and screenshots) to the appropriate spot in the SVN repo.
Get Ancestral Featured Image for WordPress
I'm in the process of developing a custom WordPress theme for one of our clients at BR. We're using a fairly standard design pattern where we set a custom image for the About page and then any subpages will use the same image. The difference for this project is that there are a couple pages that have their own special image so I wanted to be able to set a master image for a parent page but still give the child page a way to have custom images.
Thoughts on WordCamp Chicago 2012
I'm back at work after a two day WordCamp conference in Chicago. The sessions were fantastic! Most of them provided information that I've been meaning to look up or information about problems I'm bound to run into. I stayed primarily in the developer track and picked up a number of tricks to improve my sites. But as usual, I find more value in meeting other developers and picking their brains.
JotForm Integration Plugin for WordPress
Background
A few months ago I had a client who wanted a job application form for their website. “That should be fairly simple”, I thought. There are tons of services out there that allow you to post job listings and host application forms; the problem is that those services cost money, you know, that thing that clients never want to spend.
That means I either had to build a custom job application form for them (which would cost way too much) or I would have to find a simpler and cheaper solution. I eventually stumbled onto JotForm. They have a service that allows you to use a WYSIWYG interface to build your forms and they do all the form validation for you. They also allow you to have 100 fields on your form with the free account which beats out their competitor Wufoo (just 10 fields).