One for the WordPress Users

1/1/11 By

Here’s a little hint for the WordPress users that smacked me square between the eyes yesterday in one of those “a-hah!” moments while dinking with the theme files for my site.

A lot of people will tuck an “All content © 2003-2011 So-and-so” or similar notice in the footer of their site. If you’re one of those who do, and you’re bugged by the fact that you have to change (or forget to change) the latter year every time a new year rolls around, there’s a quick and simple solution for you.

It dawned on me, since WordPress themes are based on the PHP language (this works with any PHP based template system really), why not just tuck the date function into my template footer in place of the latter year? That way it will automatically change when it’s supposed to, and I won’t have to remember anything. So, in place of the following: 

<p>All content &copy; 2004-2011 jimmitchell.org</p>
I simply did this: 
<p>All content &copy; 2004-<?php echo date("Y") ?> jimmitchell.org</p>

Yippie! No more having to remember to change the footer on January 1st.

Overly simple? Yes. Painfully obvious? Only to those further along the path to web development enlightenment than myself. To the other neophytes like me, it’s one of those moments where we start to wonder “If I can do that, could I do this?” I hope this helps to bring one of those moments to your own work, be it for fun or profit.

Filed Under: Code, How To..., WordPress

Bogart WordPress Theme Updated

5/5/10 By

A very quick post…

A user of my Bogart WordPress theme was kind enough to point out that there was a minor bug in the comments.php file which was causing some page rendering issues when users were required to be logged in to make comments. I quickly tracked the culprit down and squashed the bug with my big size 12…

If you’re a Bogart user, head on over to the theme page and grab a new copy. Or, if you’ve modified the theme in some way, all you really have to replace is the “comments.php” file from the new archive you download, and you’re all set.

Update: Another minor bug was found in the “archive.php” file which has corrected as well, bringing the latest version to 1.0.4.

Filed Under: WordPress Tagged With: ,

Clean Up Your WordPress Database Collations

5/3/10 By

If you began using WordPress prior to version 2.2, you may notice that your database has tables with two different character sets and collations. This is because all database tables created prior to WordPress 2.2 use the latin1 character set and the latin1_swedish_ci collation, and all database tables created after WordPress 2.2 use the utf8 character set and the utf8_general_ci collation.

(Via MacManX.com.)

James Huff has written a very handy how-to for fixing your WordPress character sets & collations. I highly recommend preforming the clean up if you’re technically savvy and have access to your MySQL database. I was in bad need of a clean up myself, and this helped tremendously. I was also able to fix some other lingering link and email address issues I’ve caused by serving my WordPress install on 3 different domains over the years.

Filed Under: Linked List, WordPress Tagged With: , ,

Bogart WordPress Theme Updated to v1.0.2

1/3/10 By

A quick note to say that a few more tweaks to my Bogart theme has brought it to version 1.0.2, and is downloadable from the Bogart page.

If you use it and like it, go get it…

Filed Under: WordPress Tagged With: , ,

Bogart WordPress Theme Finally Updated

12/12/09 By

I’m very pleased to announce that after a few days of nose to the grindstone, my Bogart WordPress theme has been updated in a major way, and is now released as a full-fledged “1.0″ version.

Lots of enhancements went into this release. First, there’s the use of a custom display font for the “H tags” (H1, H2, etc.) using the next big thing, @font-face styling. They face used is “Tiresias Infofont“. It’s a nice, modern display font. For other free fonts that can be used in CSS & HTML pages/themes, visit Font Squirrel. There is a metric ton of cool faces available for use there.

Second, the main navigation now supports drop-down menus for subpages. See it in action by hovering over the Projects link in the navigation menu above, you’ll see a drop-down for all of my themes — that is, unless you’re browsing with IE6, and if you are, shame on you. Get with the times already…

Third, Bogart now properly handles threaded comments, which were introduced in WordPress 2.7.

Last, but not least, depending on the type of page (index, post or page) you can set up the left sidebar column to use different widget configurations. If you want one widget to display on your index page, and some other on a single post, you can have it. If you don’t want post related widgets on your non-post pages, you can have that too. The right sidebar is shared among all page types, so you can put the widgets you want on all pages there.

There are a lot of other little style related things that make the theme overall more pretty, and more modern than its predecessors. If you’re using Bogart already, I know you’ll really like this version.

Head on over to the Bogart page and download yourself a copy. You’ll be glad you did. Or, if you want to see the theme in action, browse the site.

Let me know what you think.

Filed Under: WordPress Tagged With: , ,
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