Pro Blog Design

WordPress theme option panels were a tremendous stride in the world of theme development; they gave site owner’s the ability to modify various aspects of their site, without ever having to touch the code. Every great theme either has or should have an extensive options panel.

In this tutorial, I’m going to demonstrate how to add a custom font uploader to your options panel. This will allow site owners to upload any number of font files and apply them to different sections of the site.

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There has been another GPL storm going on in the WordPress world in the past few days. Yep, again.

I don’t normally make a comment on them, but given that I’m directly involved with it now through PliablePress themes (All of our themes have to come with some sort of license, right?), it seems time to finally step in.

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Automatically grabbing thumbnails from posts is cool. But what about automatic excerpt lengths that match the height of those photos?

I recently redesigned a blog for a client and it had an automatic thumbnail for each post, with a fixed length excerpt beside it. It was okay, but our client didn’t like the fact that it was “cutting” his pictures off sometimes. Our goal then had 3 steps:

• 1 – To set a thumbnail’s height proportional to the original picture, so that we would not cut parts of it off.
• 2 – Use this height value to display excerpts about the same size.
• 3 – Set up an automatic Lightbox on images that are too large for the content area.

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Want to know why so many of our clients in the past few months had to be turned away?

Want to see the biggest project I’ve ever worked on at Pro Blog Design?

So what is it? At its simplest, PliablePress means WordPress themes. But we’ve put everything into this, these aren’t simple little themes that you can turn out in a weekend.

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Have you looked near your MySQL database since you first set it up? If you’re like most of us, you probably don’t go in there too often.

MySQL is complicated and unfriendly to use, and well, your site works as it is. So why bother?

If you do happen to venture in there occasionally though, you might find there are a few simple tricks you can pull to make the most of your database usage. From headache-saving tricks for you, to cranking a little more performance out of your server, check out the 7 tips below.

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Comments are gold. There’s little a blogger loves more than to see a whole list of comments posted on his/her article. It’s great to know people want to engage with you, and they can add a lot to an article.

However, if comments are not done well, they can be difficult to read and follow, or even just downright boring.

What we’re going to do first is create a custom comment callback that allows us to specify the way the comments are output, then lay out the structure for the comment list and reply form, add extra functionality such as author-only styles, implement comment subscription options and spam protection, and, finally, we’ll add nice CSS styling to everything we’ve done.

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WordPress’s popularity and usefulness as a multi-purpose content management system, continues to grow, and the more people flock to using this CMS the more an understanding of some of the basics of how it operates becomes necessary.

In that vein, I have put together this post that examines the WordPress template hierarchy and the use of conditional statements. Technically you only need two files for a WordPress theme to work, index.php and style.css.

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